But there was one awkward thing about the business: if they kept this thing up, not a solitary Virginian would ever reach heaven. That thought gave me pause, one day; and ever since I have hoped that somebody had made a mistake, somehow. At any rate, said I to myself, in my slack-twisted, Bushwhackerish way, the Jews will get away; and that will be a comfort, considering what an Unrevised Edition of a time they have had for these two thousand years. But as a guerilla, as a free lance, unattached and un-uniformed, and falling in, as occasion served, now with one regiment and now with another, I found that things were even worse than I have represented them. You see they didn’t mind me, and so talked very freely in my presence; and I was shocked to find that these various companies and battalions privately nourished a keener animosity one against the other than towards the common enemy, Ah Sin. If each could have heard what the others said of them (as I did), and where they sent them! I came to the conclusion, at last, that there was not the shadow of a chance for any Virginia Protestant. There were not enough Catholics to keep them busy; they fell upon one another, and so many cars did they couple on to the through mail (ole Virginny nebber tire!) that it became a most Unlimited Express, choke-full of Virginia gentlemen,—Virginia gentlemen who had erred in the interpretation of a phrase or so, or, it may be, of a word merely, of Holy Writ. Ole Virginny nebber tire! I say Virginia gentlemen advisedly. Environments may have their environments (just as fleas have other fleas to bite ’em, and so we go _ad infinitum_), and, thorough-going as was our theology, it had to succumb in the presence of our chivalry towards the sex; for throughout all our borders there lived not a man, lay or clerical, who would not have scorned to send a woman to the bottomless pit. But as for the Virginia gentlemen, we shovelled them all in with an industry (ole Virginny nebber tire!) and an undoubting zeal that were above all praise. That’s the reason I always did love a Virginian; he won’t stand any nonsense. “Do you believe that a prodigious majority of mankind were elected unto damnation, ages before they were born? No?” Swish! and that is the end of you! Another: “And so you say that _baptizo_ means baptize, do you?”—“Why, don’t the dictionaries and all the Greek profess—” budjum! and where are you now? For, in matters of this kind, we Virginians of that day, if you would agree with us, would agree with you; but—if not—you might go—your way,—for the King James version obtained in those times. Ah, but we were out-and-outers in those good old days! Ole Virginny nebber tire! Strange! for time was when things were very different in the Old Dominion. Our ancestors had brought over with them the spirit of the merrie old England of hundreds of years ago; and merry men were they, too, for a long time after they landed on these fair shores.