In the brush

by Hamilton W. Pierson

"What did you say that Greek word was that always means 'immerse'?" said my friend, the young Presbyterian preacher, a recent graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, who was sitting immediately opposite the Judge.

"Do you know anything about Greek?" responded the Judge.

"Not much," replied the young preacher.

"Do you know anything about it? Have you ever studied it at all?" continued the Judge.

"I have studied and read it some for about a dozen years," rejoined my friend.

The Judge immediately started off upon an episode full of anecdote and amusement, and did not get back to answer the question in regard to the Greek while the company remained at the table.

The Doctor informed me that, as they left the table, he walked off alone into the garden, but was soon overtaken by the Judge, who exclaimed:

"Where did you come from, stranger, and how did you get among these hills, a man that has studied Greek a dozen years? Now let me own up. I don't know a thing about Greek; never studied it at all. I don't know a Greek letter from a turkey-track. I am a candidate for Congress, out on an electioneering excursion. I knew everybody at the table but you, and I saw that it was a Baptist crowd. I wanted to win their favor and get their votes. I heard Parson Smith preach on baptism in the city last winter, and I was giving them his Greek as well as I could remember it. Now," said the Judge, with a jolly laugh at the ridiculousness of his position, "if you let this out on me so that my opponent can get hold of it before I am through this canvass, I'll never forgive you."

It is but simple justice to these Baptists to say that, had the Judge chanced to dine and eat peaches-and-cream that day with a company of adherents of the other champion, his predilections would have been just as strong in favor of Parson Clarke, and he would have marshaled his Greek just as positively in favor of "infants" as "subjects" and "sprinkling" as the "mode."

I am sure I shall be pardoned if I interrupt the flow of my narrative to speak of what seems to me the remarkable fact that, more than forty years after the scenes I have just described, I am able to say that the "Parson Smith," so named by the candidate as furnishing his Greek, was a revered friend whom, until quite recently, I had not met for more than twenty years; to whose hospitable home, cheered by the bright sunshine of one of the noblest and the best of wives and mothers, I was for years welcomed on my return from my long horseback journeys, with a cordiality as warm, I am sure, as though I had been a member of his own ecclesiastical fold or diocese, who, now in his eighty-eighth year, resides in New York City, the honored and beloved senior Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.