But that brother, without knowing it, got through in six weeks. He had sold out his entire stock of goods, and ought to have shut up shop. Congregations enjoy flowers and well-folded pocket-handkerchiefs for occasional desserts, but do not like them for a regular meal. The most urbane elder was sent to the minister to intimate that the Lord was probably calling him to some other field, but the elder was baffled by the graciousness of his pastor, and unable to discharge his mission, and after he had for an hour hemmed and hawed, backed out.
Next, a woman with a very sharp tongue was sent to talk to the minister's wife. The war-cloud thickened, the pickets were driven in, and then a skirmish, and after a while all the batteries were opened, and each side said that the other side lied, and the minister dropped his pocket-handkerchief and showed his claws as long as those of Nebuchadnezzar after he had been three years eating grass like an ox. We admire long pastorates when it is agreeable to both parties, we know ministers who boast they have been thirty years in one place, though all the world knows they have been there twenty-nine years too long. Their congregations are patiently waiting their removal to a higher latitude. Meanwhile, those churches are like a man with chronic rheumatism, very quiet—not because they admire rheumatism, but because there is no use kicking with a swollen foot, since it would hurt them more than the object assaulted.
If a pastorate can be maintained only through conflict or ecclesiastical tyranny, it might better be abandoned. There are many ministers who go away from their settlements before they ought, but we think there are quite as many who do not go soon enough. A husband might just as well try to keep his wife by choking her to death with a marriage ring as a minister to try to keep a church's love by ecclesiastical violence. Study the best time to quit.
CHAPTER XXXV.
AN EDITOR'S CHIP-BASKET.
On our way out the newspaper rooms we stumbled over the basket in which is deposited the literary material we cannot use. The basket upset and surprised us with its contents. On the top were some things that looked like fifteen or twenty poems. People outside have no idea of the amount of rhyme that comes to a printing office. The fact is that at some period in every one's life he writes "poetry." His existence depends upon it. We wrote ten or fifteen verses ourselves once. Had we not written them just then and there, we might not be here. They were in long metre, and "Old Hundred" would have fitted them grandly.
Many people are seized with the poetic spasm when they are sick, and their lines are apt to begin with.
"O mortality! how frail art thou!"
Others on Sabbath afternoons write Sabbath-school hymns, adding to the batch of infinite nonsense that the children are compelled to swallow. For others a beautiful curl is a corkscrew pulling out canto after canto. Nine-tenths of the rhyme that comes to a printing office cannot be used. You hear a rough tear of paper, and you look around to see the managing editor adding to the responsibilities of his chip-basket. What a way that is to treat incipient Tennysons and Longfellows!