Not many months ago there was a meeting of ministers in Wisconsin, and
after the holy work in which they were engaged had been done up to the
satisfaction of all, a citizen of the place where the conference was held
invited a large number of them to a collation at his house. After supper a
dozen of them adjourned to a room up stairs to have a quiet smoke, as
ministers sometimes do, when they got to talking about old times, when
they attended school and were boys together, and _The Sun_ man, who was
present, disguised as a preacher, came to the conclusion that ministers
were rather human than otherwise when they are young.
One two-hundred pound delegate with a cigar between his fingers, blew the
smoke out of the mouth which but a few hours before was uttering a
supplication to the Most High to make us all good, punched a thin elder in
the ribs with his thumb and said: "Jim, do you remember the time we
carried the cow and calf up into the recitation room?" For a moment "Jim"
was inclined to stand on his dignity, and he looked pained, until they all
began to laugh, when he looked around to see if any worldly person was
present, and satisfying himself that we were all truly good, he said: "You
bet your life I remember it. I have got a scar on my shin now where that
d--blessed cow hooked me," and he began to roll up his trouser leg to show
the scar. They told him they would take his word, and he pulled down his
pants and said:
"Well, you see I was detailed to attend to the calf, and I carried the
calf up stairs, assisted by Bill Smith--who is preaching in Chicago; got a
soft thing--five thousand a year, and a parsonage furnished, and keeps a
team, and if one of those horses is not a trotter then I am no judge of
horseflesh or of Bill, and if he don't put on an old driving coat and go
out on the road occasionally and catch on for a race with some
wordly-minded man, then I am another. You hear me--well, I never knew a
calf was so heavy, and had so many hind legs. Kick! Why, bless your old
alabaster heart, that calf walked all over me, from Genesis to
Revelations. And say, we didn't get much of a breeze the next morning, did
we, when we had to clean out the recitation room?"
[Illustration: SACRED MEMORIES]
A solemn-looking minister, with red hair, who was present, and whose eyes
twinkled some through the smoke, said to another:
"Charlie, you remember you were completely gone on the professor's niece
who was visiting there from Poughkeepsie? What become of her."
Charlie put his feet on the table, struck a match on his trousers, and
said:
"Well, I wasn't gone on her, as you say, but just liked her. Not
too well, you know, but just well enough. She had a color of hair that I
could never stand--just the color of yours, Hank--and when she got to
going with a printer I kind of let up, and they were married. I understand
he is editing a paper somewhere in Illinois, and getting rich. It was
better for her, as now she has a place to live, and does not have to board
around like a country school ma'am, as she would if she had married me."
A dark haired man, with a coat buttoned clear to the neck, and a
countenance like a funeral sermon, with no more expression than a wooden
decoy duck, who was smoking a briar-wood pipe that he had picked up on a
what-not that belonged to the host, knocked the ashes out in a spittoon,
and said:
"Boys, do you remember the time we stole that three-seated wagon and went
out across the marsh to Kingsley's farm, after watermelons?"
Four of them said they remembered it well enough, and Jim said all he
asked was to live long enough to get even with Bill Smith, the Chicago
preacher, for suggesting to him to steal a bee-hive on the trip. "Why,"
said he, "before I had got twenty feet with that hive, every bee in it had
stung me a dozen times. And do you remember how we played it on the
professor, and made him believe that I had the chicken pox? O, gentlemen,
a glorious immortality awaits you beyond the grave for lying me out of
that scrape."
The fat man hitched around uneasy in his chair and said they all seemed to
have forgotten the principal event of that excursion, and that was how he
tried to lift a bull dog over the fence by the teeth, which had become
entangled in a certain portion of his wardrobe that should not be
mentioned, and how he left a sample of his trousers in the possession of
the dog, and how the farmer came to the college the next day with
his eyes blacked, and a piece of trousers cloth done up in a paper, and
wanted the professor to try and match it with the pants of some of the
divinity students, and how he had to put on a pair of nankeen pants and
hide his cassimeres in the boat house until the watermelon scrape blew
over and he could get them mended.
Then the small brunette minister asked if he was not entitled to some
credit for blacking the farmer's eyes. Says he: "When he got over the
fence and grabbed the near horse by the bits, and said he would have the
whole gang in jail, I felt as though something had got to be done, and I
jumped out on the other side of the wagon and walked around to him and put
up my hands and gave him 'one, two, three' about the nose, with my
blessing, and he let go that horse and took his dog back to the house."
"Well," says the red haired minister, "those melons were green, anyway,
but it was the fun of stealing them that we were after."
At this point the door opened and the host entered, and, pushing the smoke
away with his hands, he said: "Well, gentlemen, you are enjoying
yourselves?"
They threw their cigar stubs in the spittoon, the solemn man laid the
brier wood pipe where he got it, and the fat man said:
"Brother Drake, we have been discussing the evil effects of indulging in
the weed, and we have come to the conclusion that while tobacco is always
bound to be used to a certain extent by the thoughtless, it is a duty the
clergy owe to the community to discountenance its use on all possible
occasions. Perhaps we had better adjourn to the parlor, and after asking
divine guidance take our departure."