“He wants to do right, that old Uncle does. He would be jest as glad to get rid of all of you,—Mormons, Oneida Communities, Free Lovers, and the hull caboodle of you,—as our old mare would be glad to get rid of flies in fly-time. But the thing of it is, with Samuel and the mare, how to go to work to do it. He can’t see to everything without help. I know what he needs. He needs a good, strong friend to help him. He wants to have somebody tell him the plain truth, to get his dander completely up; and then he wants to have that same female stand right by him, with a cast-iron determination, and hand him bullets and cartridges, while he aims his old revolutionary musket, and shoots down iniquities on every side of him.
“Why, where would Josiah Allen be, if it wuzn’t for me? He would come to nothin’, morals and all, if it wuzn’t for me to hunch him up. And Samuel has as much agin to worry him as Josiah has.
“Why, there is no tellin’ how many things that old man has to plague him and torment the very life out of him. Little things, too, some of ’em, but how uncommon little things will worry anybody, ’specially in the night. Curious things, too, some of ’em, that has worried me most to death way off here in Jonesville, and what feelin’s I should have felt to have had it a goin’ on right under my nose, as Samuel did.
“Now, when they made that new silver dollar, right there in his house I s’pose they done it, or in his wood-shed or barn—anyway, it was right where he could see it a goin’ on, and worry over it—you know they put onto it, ‘In God we trust.’ And it has fairly hanted me to find out what the government really meant by it—whether they meant that God wouldn’t let ’em get found out in their cheatin’ seven cents on every dollar, or trusted He would let ’em cheat fourteen cents on the next ones they made.
THE CALL TO DUTY.
“Why, it has worried me awfully, and how Samuel must have felt about it. And that is only one little thing.
“There is the trade dollars we made on purpose to cheat China with, and sent over in the same ship we sent missionaries to convert ’em. I persume to say that old man has laid awake nights a worryin’ over what the heathens would think about it—about our sendin’ religion and robbery over to ’em in the same ship—about our sendin’ religious tracts, exhortin’ ’em to be honest, or they would certainly go to that bad place which I do not, as a Methodist, wish to speak of, and send these dollars to cheat ’em with in the same box—sendin’ eloquent and heartrendin’ tracts provin’ out to ’em that no drunkard can possibly go to Heaven, packed side by side with barrels of whiskey to teach ’em how to get drunk, so they will be sure not to go there. I know it has wore on him, so afraid that the heathens would be perfectly disgusted with a religion taught by professed followers of Him who come down to earth bearing peace, good-will to men, and then, after 1800 years of professed loyalty to Him, and His pure and exalted teachings, bore to their shores such fruit as cheating, falsehood, and drunkenness.
HELPS FOR THE HEATHEN.