Here I am, then, since it must be. Every one has heard the story of the Frenchman who, after a tour through America (or was it England?), had but this to say of us: that we were a people with thirty religions and but a single sauce. I hardly think that we in Virginia, at least at the period of this story, were quite so rich in religions as this. Very likely, some of the sects discovered by our observant Gaul had no representatives in the Old Dominion. At any rate, I, after diligent inquiry in many quarters, have not been able to unearth more than fifteen distinct varieties. I did not count, I admit, a certain flock of migratory Mormons that I once encountered on the wing; just as, I presume, a naturalist would hardly class the Canada goose among Virginia birds, from the mere fact that they refresh themselves, in the spring of the year, in our wheat-fields. Nor did I think that a man and his wife and a boy whom I once knew, could fairly claim to be numbered as a sect merely because, as their fellow-villagers asserted, they professed to believe something that nobody could understand. Then I am afraid that even the very sects themselves would insist on my leaving out the Bushwhackers,—slack-twisted Christians like myself, that is, who can’t abide uniforms, and find it hot marching in ranks, and irksome to keep step; though we do cover the flanks of the main column, and, while we don’t attack in line, yet keep up a rattling fire upon such stray sinners as we find prowling about. And so forth, and so forth. Still (for I would not incur the suspicion of niggardliness), it is very possible that, had I searched with greater diligence, I should have found more than fifteen. We will allow, then, that, at the period which we are sketching, there were, say, a dozen and a half religions in Virginia. And when I say religions, I have not in my mind a milk-and-water, namby-pamby, good-enough-for-me kind creed, but one of your up-and-down, robustious, straight-from-the-shoulder dogmas, that could ship off entire churchfuls of heterodoxers to—(but since the Revised Edition the word is scarcely parliamentary) without a wry face. Thither our Virginia Catholics used to despatch all our Protestants, to a man; but, inasmuch as their numbers were few (and, strictly speaking, the thing was, perhaps, contrary to the Constitution of the United States), they did it all very decently and quietly; sending them off by night-train, as it were, and making no loud mention of the fact. Not so their opponents. Greatly outnumbering the followers of the scarlet woman of Babylon, they rattled them off in broad daylight, by the through mail, making no bones of naming the terminus of the road. Ah, but it was thorough work on both sides! Ole Virginny nebber tire!