“Very nice beer, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s A 1, and I’ve had four glasses; but it ain’t reg’lar beer, cause, however much you drinks, you don’t get any forrader with it. It won’t make you drunk, will it, now?”
“You surely do not want it to make you drunk, do you?”
“Well—no—not as I knows on,” said Nelson, slowly; and the men around him laughed.
“I used to go to church when I were a boy,” said another man, Benham; “but if I go anywhere now, I goes to the Methodists when they has the open-air service. It don’t agree with my health to be shut up in a close church or chapel.”
“I suppose you find a bar-room better ventilated?” said Tom; and this time the laugh was against Benham.
“I used to go to church when I were a boy,” echoed another man. “My father were one of the singers, and he left all through a quarrel about a anthem. He wanted ‘All people that on earth do dwell’; but another man wanted ‘I will arise’; my father wouldn’t give way, nor the other man neither. Father says, ‘It shall be “All people that on earth do dwell,”’ and the t’other says, ‘Cuss “All people that on earth do dwell”’; and my father put on his hat, and walked out of the church forthwith, and he never entered it again till he were carried there; and that is the truth, and I do not deceive you.”
The last words were spoken so solemnly that Tom had to beat a retreat. But the evening passed pleasantly enough, and Margaret’s singing was greatly appreciated.
The next night the attendance was less, for some of the men spent the evening at the public-houses, talking the matter over; but our friends were not discouraged. They resolved to keep on—and wait. They were trying to feel their way, and by a wise judiciousness overcome the suspicion and opposition which they would probably encounter.
But from that seed-sowing harvest day could be dated a most beneficent change in Darentdale. The homes of the people put on a more comfortable appearance, and the spiritless women, feeling that something was expected of them in return for the sympathy and help which they received, began to be more sprightly, and to take some pride in making their rooms not only clean but pretty. By the end of the year but few had grown weary in well-doing, and in many hearts that had been hopeless before new hopes were springing up.