Scotch song (Tune—“Twas within a mile of Edinboro'town”)
“Twas within a hall of Rilchester town,
In the bleak spring-time of the year,
Luke Raeburn gave a lecture on the soul of man,
And found that it cost him dear.
Windows all were smashed that day,
They said: 'The atheist can pay.'
But Scottish Raeburn, frowning cried:
'Na, na, it winna do,
I canna, canna, winna, winna, munna pay for you.'”
The parody ran on through the three verses of the song, the conclusion was really witty, and there was no sting in it. Erica laughed over it as she had not laughed for weeks. Tom, who had been trying unsuccessfully to cheer her ever since her return, was quite relieved.
“I believe the sixpence a day style suits you,” he said. “But, I say, isn't anything coming up? I'm as hungry as a hunter.”
Their elders being away for a few days, Tom and Erica were amusing themselves by trying to live on the rather strange diet of the man who published his plan for living at the smallest possible cost. They were already beginning to be rather weary of porridge, pea soup and lentils. This evening pea soup was in the ascendant, and Erica, tired with a long afternoon's work, felt as if she could almost as soon have eaten Thames mud.
“Dear me,” she said, “it never struck me, this is our Lenten penance! Now, wouldn't any one looking in fancy we were poor Romanists without an indulgence?”
“Certainly without any self-indulgence,” said Tom, who never lost an opportunity of making a bad pun.
“It would be a great indulgence to stop eating,” said Erica, sighing over the soup yet to be swallowed.
“Do you think it is more inspiriting to fast in order to save one's soul than it is to pay the chieftain's debts? I wish I could honestly say, like the little French girl in her confession: 'J'ai trop mang.'”
Tom dearly loved that story, he was exceeding fond of getting choice little anecdotes from various religious newspapers, especially those which dealt in much abuse of the Church of Rome, and he retailed them CON AMORE. Erica listened to several, and laughed a good deal over them.
“I wonder, though, they don't see how they play into our hands by putting in these things,” she said after Tom had given her a description of some ludicrous attack made by a ritualist on an evangelical. “I should have thought they would have tried to agree whenever they could, instead of which they seem almost as spiteful to each other as they are to us.”