1.50. PAYING FOR HIS PROVENDER BY PRAYING.
We have no intention of making fun of serious matters in telling the following story; we merely relate a fact.
There is a rule at Oberlin College that no student shall board at any house where prayers are not regularly made each day. A certain man fitted up a boarding-house and filled it with boarders, but forgot, until the eleventh hour, the prayer proviso. Not being a praying man himself, he looked around for one who was. At length he found one—a meek young man from Trumbull County—who agreed to pay for his board in praying. For a while all went smoothly, but the boarding-master furnished his table so poorly that the boarders began to grumble and to leave, and the other morning the praying boarder actually "struck!" Something like the following dialogue occurred at the table:—
LANDLORD.—Will you pray, Mr. Mild?
MILD.—No, sir, I will not.
LANDLORD.—Why not, Mr. Mild?
MILD.—It don't pay, sir. I can't pray on such victuals as these.
And unless you bind yourself in writing to set a better table than
you have for the last three weeks, NARY ANOTHER PRAYER YOU GET OUT
OF ME!
And that's the way the matter stood at latest advices.