Cousins -- Fiction; Prince Edward Island -- Fiction; Storytellers -- Fiction
An electric shock seemed to run through the audience. Everybody looked
suddenly alert. Peter had, in one sentence, done what my whole sermon
had failed to do. He had made an impression.
“I shall divide my sermon into three heads,” pursued Peter. “The first
head is, what you must not do if you don’t want to go to the bad place.
The second head is, what the bad place is like”--sensation in the
audience--“and the third head is, how to escape going there.
“Now, there’s a great many things you must not do, and it’s very
important to know what they are. You ought not to lose no time in
finding out. In the first place you mustn’t ever forget to mind what
grown-up people tell you--that is, GOOD grown-up people.”
“But how are you going to tell who are the good grown-up people?” asked
Felix suddenly, forgetting that he was in church.
“Oh, that is easy,” said Peter. “You can always just FEEL who is good
and who isn’t. And you mustn’t tell lies and you mustn’t murder any
one. You must be specially careful not to murder any one. You might be
forgiven for telling lies, if you was real sorry for them, but if you
murdered any one it would be pretty hard to get forgiven, so you’d
better be on the safe side. And you mustn’t commit suicide, because
if you did that you wouldn’t have any chance of repenting it; and you
mustn’t forget to say your prayers and you mustn’t quarrel with your
sister.”
At this point Felicity gave Dan a significant poke with her elbow, and
Dan was up in arms at once.
“Don’t you be preaching at me, Peter Craig,” he cried out. “I won’t
stand it. I don’t quarrel with my sister any oftener than she quarrels
with me. You can just leave me alone.”
“Who’s touching you?” demanded Peter. “I didn’t mention no names. A
minister can say anything he likes in the pulpit, as long as he doesn’t
mention any names, and nobody can answer back.”
“All right, but just you wait till to-morrow,” growled Dan, subsiding
reluctantly into silence under the reproachful looks of the girls.
“You must not play any games on Sunday,” went on Peter, “that is, any
week-day games--or whisper in church, or laugh in church--I did that
once but I was awful sorry--and you mustn’t take any notice of Paddy--I
mean of the family cat at family prayers, not even if he climbs up on
your back. And you mustn’t call names or make faces.”
“Amen,” cried Felix, who had suffered many things because Felicity so
often made faces at him.
Peter stopped and glared at him over the edge of the Pulpit Stone.
“You haven’t any business to call out a thing like that right in the
middle of a sermon,” he said.
“They do it in the Methodist church at Markdale,” protested Felix,
somewhat abashed. “I heard them.”
“I know they do. That’s the Methodist way and it is all right for them.
I haven’t a word to say against Methodists. My Aunt Jane was one, and
I might have been one myself if I hadn’t been so scared of the Judgment
Day. But you ain’t a Methodist. You’re a Presbyterian, ain’t you?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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