A Dunker preacher once said to me,—
“We believe that, after Adam, all were born in sin; but, after Christ, all were born without sin.”
And a Mennist neighbor says,—
“Children have no sin; the kingdom of heaven is of little children.”
I continued to lie still, looking at the rafters and roof, and speculating as to their being so clean, and clear of cobwebs, and whether they had been laboriously swept; and then, gathering my wardrobe together with some little trouble, I was at last ready to go down. As I went to a window, I saw Orion and Sirius, and the coming day.
Going down to wash at the pump, in the morning gloaming, while the landscape still lay in shade, I found two or three lads at the pump, and one of them pumped for me. I was so ignorant of pump-washing as to wonder why he pumped so small a stream, and to suspect that he was making fun; but thus it seems it is proper to do, to avoid wetting the sleeves.
Here I met a pretty young sister, from Cumberland County,—fat and fair,—whose acquaintance I had made the day before. Her cap was of lace, and not so plain as the rest. There was with her at the pump one of the world’s people, a young girl in a blue dress.
“Is that your sister?” I asked.
“It’s the daughter of the woman I live with,” she replied. “I have no sister. I am hired with her mother.”
To my inexperienced eye it was not easy to tell the rich Dunkers from the poor, when all wore so plain a dress. I was afterward much surprised on discovering that this pretty sister did not understand German. Another from Cumberland County told me that I ought to come to their meeting, which was nearly all English.