Crupp being human, was not saintly, so he flushed angrily, and replied,
“It ought to be, if the religion you’re so fond of is worth a row of pins; but I don’t know what you’re driving at.”
“Oh! of course you don’t know,” said Father Baguss; “but everybody else does. You don’t expect to make any money out of that woolen mill, do you?”
“Yes I do, too,” answered Crupp quickly. “I’ll make every cent I can out of it.”
“Just so,” said Father Baguss, consoling himself with a bite of tobacco; “an’ them that’s borne the burden and heat of the day can plod along and not make a cent ’xcept by the hardest knocks. I’ve been one of the Sons of Temperance ever since I was converted, an’ that’s nigh onto forty year; I don’t see why I don’t get my sheer of the good things of this world.”
“If you mean,” said Crupp, with incomparable deliberation, “that my taking stock in the mill is a reward to me for dropping the liquor business, you’re mightily mistaken. I’d have taken it all the same if anybody had put me up to it when I was in the liquor business.”
“Yes,” sighed Father Baguss, “like enough you would; as the Bible says, ‘The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light.’ I can’t help a-gettin’ mad, though, to think it has to be so.”
Two or three unsuccessful farmers lounging about the stove sighed sympathetically, but Crupp indulged in a sarcastic smile, and remarked,
“I always supposed it was because the children of light had got their treasure laid up in heaven, and were above such worldly notions.”
The late sympathizers of Father Baguss saw the joke, and laughed with unkind energy, upon which the good old man straightened himself and exclaimed,