“Another evil of the railroad is that it will bring more and more of the wicked city element into the country. The aqueduct has practically ruined an entire region. Have you seen the hollow Chinese wall they are building for the Croton water? Ah, yes! Indeed! Most impressive, but if man’s work destroys God’s beautiful country where will be the profit? “The Continental Sabbath will soon destroy the rural peace as it has already destroyed New York’s good name. The chains are no longer drawn across Broadway before the church services and any Tom, Dick, or Harry may now drive his rattletrap past the sacred edifice on his way to some pagan holiday. “In the good old days even taking a walk on Sunday was recognized as a disrespect to the Lord. Nowadays men go driving! And not always without fair companions of the most frivolous sort. In my day a gentleman, passing his most intimate friend on the way to church, would greet him with a cold and formal nod. Nowadays people smile and laugh on Sunday as if it were merely a day like another! Where will it end? I tremble to think of it. “I have just witnessed an example of the extent to which the new lawlessness is carrying us. Fortunately I was able to deal with it sternly.” He told how some of the aqueduct laborers had spent their Sunday off, not in pious meditation and fasting, but in sauntering about the country. Their paganism had gone so far that when they came upon a patch of wild whortleberries growing by the roadside, they brazenly began to pick and eat them and gather others to take to their camp. “Driving home from the service I chanced to see them, and I determined to put a stop at once to this violation of the laws of God and man. I ordered the county sheriff to arrest the culprits. They were fined a shilling each for the sacrilege. “Unfortunately, this was not the end of it. The depths of human depravity were disclosed in the behavior of these gross men. Only last Sabbath, instead of going to church, they hung about the village. Most unluckily, the sheriff’s daughter carelessly went into the garden and picked a few currants for the midday dinner. Whereupon the laborers called on her father and demanded that he arrest his own daughter. He had to do it, too, and pay her fine of a shilling. It will be a lesson to the wicked girl, but it rather undoes the good I was able to impress on the laborers.” Dr. Chirnside was aghast at such levity, such contempt for sacred things, but RoBards took no comfort in the thought that, since man’s quenchless thirst for horrors could be slaked with such trivial atrocities, his own tragedy was only one example more. He felt an almost irresistible impulse to seize the clergyman by the sleeve and cry: “What would you say if I told you of what has been going on in my own home? My wife is a member of your congregation; she has been brought up with every warning against immodesty of thought or action, and yet—and yet——”