“‘Well, what is it, dear?’
“‘Why, the chief end of man, Sir, is his head and shoulders.’
“‘Oh,’ said a little lassie that was listening to the conversation, ‘if you know all these things, Sir, can you tell me if Noah had any butterflies in the ark? I wonder how in the world he ever got hold of them! Many and many a beauty have I chased all day, and I never could catch one yet.’”
“I can tell you a better one than that,” says Larry Hilliard. “Do you recollect old Hardwood, our under-sheriff? He has a very beautiful daughter, and she was married last week at St Paul’s Church, to a lieutenant in the navy. There was such an immense crowd present (for they were considered the handsomest couple ever married there), that she got so confused she could hardly get through the responses. When the archdeacon said, ‘Will you have this man to be your wedded husband?’
“‘Yes,’ she said, and made a slight pause; and then became bewildered, and got into her catechism. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘by God’s grace I will, and I humbly thank my Heavenly Father for having brought me to this state of salvation.’
“It was lucky she spoke low, and that the people didn’t distinctly hear her, but it nearly choaked the parson.”
“Talking of church anecdotes,” says Lawyer Martin, “reminds me of old Parson Byles, of St John’s, New Brunswick. Before the American rebellion he was rector at Boston, and he had a curate who always preached against the Roman Catholics. It tickled the Puritans, but didn’t injure the Papists, for there were none there at that time. For three successive Sundays he expounded the text, ‘And Peter’s wife’s mother lay ill of a fever.’
“From which he inferred priests ought to marry. Shortly after that the bell was tolling one day, and somebody asked Dr Byles who was dead.
“Says he, and he looked solemcoly, shut one eye and winked with the other, as if he was trying to shut that also—‘I rather think it is Peter’s wife’s mother, for she has been ill of a fever for three weeks.’”
There are charms in these little “home scenes,” these little detached sketches, which are wholly lost in a large landscape.