It does not seem as though managers of camp meetings deliberately consult the almanac in order to pick out a week for camp meeting in the dark of the moon, though such meetings are always held when the moon is of no account. If they do, then there is a reason for it. It is well known that pickerel bite best in the dark of the moon, and it is barely possible that sinners “catch on” better at that time.
There may be something in the atmosphere, in the dark of the moon, that makes a camp meeting more enjoyable. Certainly brethren and sisterin' can mingle as well if not better when there is no glaring moon to molest and make them afraid, and they can relate their experience as well as though it was too light.
The prayers of the righteous avail as much in the darkness of the closet as they do in an exposition building, with an electric light, and as long as sinners will do many things which they ought not to do, and undo many, things that they never ought to have done, the dark of the moon is probably the most healthy.
People don't want to be sunburnt in the night. It seems to us as though the work of converting could be done as well in a full moon, but statistics show that such is not the case, and we are willing to give the camp meeting attendants the benefit of the doubt.
Again, it may be that the moon is to blame. No one would blame the moon, if it was full, and looked down on an ordinary camp meeting, if it got sick at the stomach, staggered behind a cloud, turned pale and refused to come out until the camp meeting was pulled by the police.
ANOTHER VIEW OF THE CASK
A new face has been put on the killing of old Mr. Utley, in Green Lake county, by his son, since the son has made his statement. At the time the first news was received we felt inclined to lay it up against young Mr. Utley, as there is nothing that hurts our feelings worse than to hear that a boy in the first flush of manhood, when the pin feathers are just appearing on his upper jaw and when the world is all before him to conquer and lay at his feet, has deliberately shot six No. 40 calibre bullets into various places in the person of his venerable father, who has nurtured him from childhood, stored his mind with useful knowledge, or perchance played mumblety peg with a shingle across the place where in later years another father may plant oblong pieces of leather, because of his habit of leaning his youthful stomach across the gate whereon swings a gentle maiden belonging to this other father, the while giving her glucose in regard to a beautiful castle that he will rear with his own hands on a commanding eminence, surrounded with vines and roses, into the golden portals of which he will usher her and empty into her lap the precious treasures of the orient, when the cuss knows that he will never be able to earn more than twelve shillings a day on a farm the longest day he lives, and that if she marries him she will have to take in stairs to scrub and cook liver over an oil stove, and wear the same dress she is married in till it will stand alone. We say that we are opposed to young men killing their fathers. It has never seemed right to us. But since the supplemental returns in this case are all in, and we learn that old Mr. Utley was a drunken bulldozer who would take the farm horses and go off to town on a three days' drunk, leaving the young man to do all the work, and come back complaining because the work was not done, and if the boy attempted to explain, he would be knocked down with a stick of cord wood, and that on this occasion he was engaged in trying to dissect young Utley with a butcher knife, claiming that he was going to hang his hide on the fence, and cut out his liver and stomach, and other things that Dr. Tanner has given a furlough, and that the young man shot his father just to keep peace in the family, and to save his own life, and that there were four quarts of raw whisky in the old man's panjandrum when he turned up his toes, we feel like apologizing to the young man and telling him that he did his country a great service in wiping out his sire, baby mine. When an old man gets so he can't enjoy himself without filling up with whisky and cutting slices off the livers of live people, the sooner he climbs the golden stair the better.