and beat toy drums for their own amusement. On one side just over a hedge, an admiring party are witnessing a boxing match between two yokels, who are giving and taking real blows in dead earnest, while just beyond is a Punch and Judy show, which always has been popular in England, and will be to the end of time. All along the dusty road are men over come with liquor, sleeping the sleep that only the drunkard knows, with faces upturned to the hot sun. They are perfectly safe, and will not be disturbed. Every Englishman of the lower class knows all about it, and as for robbery, all that he has on him couldn’t be pawned for a penny. Next to the boxing match was a street preacher of some denomination, armed with his testament and hymn-book, “holding forth” to a throng constantly coming and going. I didn’t hear this one, for we were too much on pleasure bent to stop for a sermon, be it ever so good or our need for it ever so great. But I did hear one on the grounds, and a curious sermon it was. There was no Miss Nancying about that preacher. He did not attempt to win his hearers by depicting the delights of a heaven for piety on this earth, not any. He knew his hearers too well. The lower grade Englishman might try to be good to escape a hell, but no one ever conceived a heaven that would win him. His idea of a heaven is a pot-house, with plenty of beer, and bread and cheese, and nothing to do. And so the preacher sang the hymn:—
“My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead,”
In which his audience joined, some devoutly and some jeeringly.
THE ROAD-SIDE EVANGELIST.
And he pictured hell in such lurid colors as to frighten the most hardened. He had no fancy for a hell, such as American clergymen talk about, which consists merely in being deprived of the company of angels and all that sort of thing, but he had a substantial, real hell, with actual fire and brimstone and real devils with red hot pitch-forks, toasting and gridling sinners, and rivers of fire, and perpetual torments of this cheerful kind, forever and forever. That was the kind of a hell he had.
It had its effect. One man who stood listening, with his wife, said to her as they turned away:
“Weel, Jenny, ’ell is a hawful thing, I don’t knaw but what I’ll turn around and do better, hafter to-morrow.”
And the wife assenting to this proposition they went to the nearest beer place and buried their countenances and their consciences, or their fright rather, in pots of beer that would swamp the most seasoned American, and a few moments after were dancing like mad in a booth constructed for the purpose.
Except there be a special dispensation this party will never repent, and if there be such a hell as the preacher described they will find it. Their to-morrow for becoming good, like everybody else’s, will never come. The negro who, when asked why, in view of the punishment that must follow his sinful life, he would continue in his evil courses, replied:—
“Boss, de great comfort and ’scurity I has, is in a deff-bed ’pentance.”