But Arvilly walked around it with her head up, and said that America worshipped an idol that looked enough sight worse than that and a million times worse actin’. Sez she, “This idol will stay where it is put, it won’t rare around and murder its worshippers.”
And Miss Meechim sez coldly, “I don’t know what you mean; I know that I am an Episcopalian and worship as our beautiful creed dictates.”
Sez Arvilly, “Anybody that sets expediency before principle, from a king to a ragpicker; any one who cringes to a power he knows is vile and dangerous, and protects and extends its influence from greed and ambition, such a one worships a far worse idol than this peaceable, humbly-lookin’ critter and looks worse to me enough sight.”
I hearn Miss Meechim say out to one side to Dorothy, “How sick I am of hearing her constant talk against intemperance; from California to China I have had to hear it. And you know, Dorothy, that folks can drink genteel.”
But Dorothy, with her sweet lips trembling and her white dimpled chin quivering, sez, “I should think we had suffered enough from the Whiskey Power, Auntie, to hear anything said against it, and at any time.”
And Robert Strong jined in with Dorothy, and so Miss Meechim subsided, and I see a dark shadder creep over her face, too, and tears come into her pale blue eyes. She hain’t forgot Aronette, poor little victim! Crunched and crushed under the wheels of the monster Juggernaut America rolls round to crush its people under. I wuz some like Arvilly. When I thought of that I didn’t feel to say so much aginst them foreign idols, though they wuz humbly lookin’ as I ever see. And speakin’ of idols, one day we see twelve fat hogs in a temple, where they wuz kept as sacred animals, and here agin Miss Meechim wuz horrified and praised up American doin’s, and run down China, and agin Arvilly made remarks. Sez she:
“The hogs there wallowing in their filth are poor lookin’ 181 things to kneel down and worship, but they’re shut up here with priests to tend to ’em; they can’t git out to roam round and entice innocents into their filthy sties and perpetuate their swinish lives, and that is more than we can say of the American beastly idols, or our priesthood who fatten them and themselves and then let ’em out to rampage round and act.”
Miss Meechim sithed deep and remarked to me “that the tariff laws wuz a absorbin’ topic to her mind at that time.” She did it to change the subject.
We went to a Chinese crematory and the Temple of Longevity, where if you paid enough you could git a promise of long life. Josiah is clost, but he gin quite a good deal for him, and wuz told that he would live to be one hundred and twenty-seven years of age. He felt well. Of course we had a interpreter with is who talked for us. Josiah wanted me to pay, too, for a promise. Sez he with a worried look: