"I have been hinting to them, ever since I came, improvements in cleanliness, in ventilation, and so forth: but I have been utterly unheeded: and bully me as you will, Doctor, about my cramming doctrines down their throats, and roaring like a Pope's bull, I assure you that, on sanitary reform, my roaring was as of a sucking dove, and ought to have prevailed, if soft persuasion can."
"You were a dove where you ought to have been a bull, and a bull where you ought to have been a dove. But roar now, if ever you roared, in the pulpit and out. Why not preach to them on it next Sunday?"
"Well, I'd give a lecture gladly, if I could get any one to come and hear it; but that you could do better than me."
"I'll lecture them myself, and show them bogies, if my quarter-inch will do its work. If they want seeing to believe, see they shall; I have half-a-dozen specimens of water already which will astonish them. Let me lecture, you must preach."
"You must know, that there is a feeling,—you would call it a prejudice,—against introducing such purely secular subjects into the pulpit."
Tom gave a long whistle.
"Pardon me, Mr. Headley; you are a man of sense; and I can speak to you as one human being to another, which I have seldom been able to do with your respected cloth."
"Say on; I shall not be frightened."
"Well, don't you put up the Ten Commandments in your Church?"
"Yes."