doesn't like pork or relish my imminent intimate connection with it. Every day for a month he's asked me whether I had decided. To-day I answered him with a story that Deacon Skinner used to tell about a young minister he once knew. He was parson of a small country church that paid a pretty skimpy salary, mostly in vegetables his flock could not eat themselves. There was precious little marrying and everybody that died seemed to be on the funeral free list. Altogether it was a case of labouring in a vineyard that had gone to seed, and the young preacher was more often full of inspiration than of roast turkey and fixin's. But an[Pg 37] empty stomach made a clear head and the eloquence of his sermons would have given Demosthenes a hard run for first money. [Pg 37] You can't always hide away talent so that it can't be dug up, and one Sunday the outlook committee from a fashionable church came down to D— and listened to the minister. His text that day happened to be one of those which permit of much oratory without enough orthodoxy to set the soul into convulsions. The sermon made a hit with a regular Harvard "H" and in a day or two the pastorate of the Wabash avenue church, whose steeple is nearer heaven than the majority of the congregation are likely to get, was offered to the young man, who told the committee that he must weigh the matter carefully. The news spread through the village instantly, as it always does—for any country town has Marconi beat to a custard on wireless telegraphy—and on the afternoon of the day on which the call to the new field of labor came, the young minister's parishioners inaugurated a special pilgrimage to find out the prospects. The first arrival was a woman. (Strange, isn't it, that for all a[Pg 38] woman takes so long to dress, she can always give a man a killing handicap and beat him from scratch to the scene of a scandal or a bargain sale?) She was ushered into the parlor by the clergyman's little girl. No one else seemed to be visible. The Mother Eve in her wouldn't let the visitor wait long, so she put the little girl in the quiz box. [Pg 38] "I've heerd tell, Cicely, that your pa's been asked to go to a big church up to the city." "Yes'm," answered Cicely, discreetly. "Well, child, tell me, hev you heerd him say if he's a-goin'?"
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