A ridiculous scene occurred at Palmyra, the other day. The furnace in the
basement of the church is reached by a trap door, which is right beside
the pulpit. There was a new preacher there from abroad, and he did not
know anything about the trap door, and the sexton went down there to fix
the fire, before the new minister arrived. The minister had just got
warmed up in his sermon, and was picturing to his hearers hell in all its
heat. He had got excited and told of the lake of burning brimstone below,
where the devil was the stoker, and where the heat was ten thousand times
hotter than a political campaign, and where the souls of the wicked would
roast, and fry, and stew until the place froze over.
Wiping the perspiration from his face, he said, pointing, to the floor,
"Ah, my friends, look down into that seething, burning lake,
and--" Just at this point the trap door raised a little, and the sexton's
face, with coal smut all over it, appeared. He wanted to come up and hear
the sermon.
[Illustration: "AH, MY FRIENDS, LOOK DOWN INTO THAT BURNING LAKE!"]
If hell had broke loose, the new minister could not have been more
astonished. He stepped back, grasped his manuscript, and was just about to
jump from the pulpit, when a deacon on the front seat said, "It's all
right, brother; he has only _been down below to see about the fire_." The
sexton came up and shut down the trap door, the color came back to the
face of the minister, and he went on, though the incident seemed to take
the tuck all out of him.
A traveling man who happened to be at the church tells us that he knows
the minister was scared, for he sweat so that the perspiration run right
down on the carpet and made a puddle as though a dipper of water had been
tipped over there. The minister says he was not scared, but we don't see
how he could help it.