Around the Tea-Table

by T. De Witt Talmage

Wiseman.—Have not yet made up my mind. The question is coming up in all our households as to the best mode of vacation. We shall all need rest. The first thing to do is to measure the length of your purse; you cannot make a short purse reach around Saratoga and the White Mountains. There may be as much health, good cheer and recuperation in a country farmhouse where the cows come up every night and yield milk without any chalk in it.

What the people of our cities need is quiet. What the people of the country need is sightseeing. Let the mountains come to New York and New York go to the mountains. The nearest I ever get to heaven in this world is lying flat down on my back under a tree, looking up through the branches, five miles off from a post-office or a telegraph station. But this would be torture to others.

Independent of what others do or say, let us in the selection of summer recreations study our own temperament and finances. It does not pay to spend so much money in July and August that you have to go pinched and half mad the rest of the year. The healthiest recreations do not cost much. In boyhood, with a string and a crooked pin attached to it, I fished up more fun from the mill-pond than last summer with a five-dollar apparatus I caught among the Franconia Mountains.

There is a great area of enjoyment within the circumference of one dollar if you only know how to make the circuit. More depends upon ourselves than upon the affluence of our surroundings. If you are compelled to stay home all summer, you may be as happy as though you went away. The enjoyment of the first of July, when I go off, is surpassed by nothing but the first of September, when I come home.

There being a slight pause in the conversation, Doctor Heavyasbricks woke gradually up and began to move his lips and to show strong symptoms of intention to ask for himself a question. He said: I have been attending the anniversaries in New York, and find that they are about dead. Wiseman, can you tell me what killed them?

Governor Wiseman replied: It is a great pity that the anniversaries are dead. They once lived a robust life, but began some fifteen years ago to languish, and have finally expired. To the appropriate question, What killed them? I answer, Peregrination was one of the causes. There never has been any such place for the anniversaries as the Broadway Tabernacle. It was large and social and central. When that place was torn down, the anniversaries began their travels. Going some morning out of the warm sunshine into some cathedral-looking place, they got the chills, and under the dark stained glass everything looked blue. In the afternoon they would enter some great square hall where everything was formal.

It is almost impossible to have a genial and successful meeting in a square hall. When in former days the country pastor said to his congregation, "Meet me at the New York anniversaries," they all knew where to go; but after the old Broadway Tabernacle went down, the aforesaid congregation might have looked in five or six places and not found their minister. The New York anniversaries died on the street between the old Tabernacle and St. Paul's Methodist Cathedral.

Prolix reports also helped to kill the patient. Nothing which was not in its nature immortal could have survived these. The secretary would read till he got out of wind, and would then say that the remainder of the report would be found in the printed copies in the pews. The speakers following had the burden of galvanizing an exhausted meeting, and the Christian man who attended the anniversary on retiring that evening had the nightmare in the shape of a portly secretary sitting astride his chest reading from a huge scroll of documents.

Diluted Christian oratory also helped to kill the anniversaries. The men whom we heard in our boyhood on the Broadway platform believed in a whole Bible, and felt that if the gospel did not save the world nothing ever would; consequently, they spoke in blood-red earnestness and made the place quake with their enthusiasm. There came afterward a weak-kneed stock of ministers who thought that part of the Bible was true, if they were not very much mistaken, and that, on the whole, religion was a good thing for most people, certainly if they had weak constitutions, and that man could be easily saved if we could get the phrenologist to fix up his head, and the gymnasium to develop his muscle, and the minister to coax him out of his indiscretions. Well, the anniversaries could not live on pap and confectionery, and so they died for lack of strong meat.

But the day of resurrection will come. Mark that! The tide of Bible evangelism will come up again. We may be dead, but our children will see it. New York will be thronged with men and women who will come up once a year to count the sheaves of harvest, and in some great building thronged from the platform to the vestibule an aroused Christian audience will applaud the news, just received by telegraph, of a nation born in a day, and sing with more power than when Thomas Hastings used to act as precentor: