The Deacon indulged in an interrogative whistle, and jerked his thumb in the direction of a corn-barn which stood near the base of the hill.
I requested explanation.
"The floor of that corn-barn," observed its proprietor, "is covered with husks about four foot deep. Under those husks is my patent screw and a lot of cider-fixins. That old mill's a rattle-trap, any way. There's a place at the other end of the orchard a sight more handy for a new one. So, when folks get to reading their Bible without leaving out the marriage in Cana, why"—
"Then you have been badgered into this," I said, seeing that the Deacon was not disposed to finish his sentence.
"Well, they've been pecking at me pretty hard; and when Mis' Greenlaw and the girls went over, of course I couldn't hold out. I kept telling 'em that the Lord gave us apples, and I didn't believe He cared whether we eat 'em or drank 'em. But you see I had to knock under."
I questioned if it was going to rain, after all; for the clouds were scudding off to the east.
"They're just following the bend of the river," asserted the Deacon, elevating his chin to bring them within range, and giving them a significant nod, as if to recall an appointment. "These apple-trees will be dripping well before night. I know the weather-signs in Foxden. It is going to rain,—and, what's more, when it does rain, it'll rain artichokes,—and, what's more than that, I don't care if it does!"
III.
A wretched fragment of the singing-class met at the house of Mrs. Widesworth. Professor Owlsdarck had kindly come over from Wrexford to help fill up the rooms; but the pressure of his ponderous attainments seemed only to compress yet more that handful of miscellaneous miserables in the front-parlor. Eight or ten elderly people, one or two undergraduates at home for the college-vacation,—these were the guests. The precautions of Mrs. Romulus had not been taken in vain,—there could be no singing: none, unless—but I trust that this evil suggestion occurred to nobody—we were so lost to shame as to call upon the college-boys to supply the place of our absent psalmody with some of those Bacchanalian choruses with which they were doubtless too familiar. We felt rather wicked. We knew that we were stigmatized by that terrible compound, "Pro-Rum"; we were held up as the respectable abettors of drunkenness, the dilettanti patrons of pot-houses, the cold-blooded connoisseurs in wife-beating and delirium tremens. That we really appeared all this to many honest, enthusiastic people could not be doubted.
Certain perplexing questions, which had fifty times been answered and dismissed, were ever returning to worry the general consciousness of the company:—Is it not best to scourge one's self along with a popular enthusiasm, when, by many excellent methods, it would sweep society to a definite good? Are not the ardors of the imagination better working-powers than the cold judgments of the reason? Should we ever be carping at controlling principles, when much of their present manifestation seems full of active worthiness? Above all, have we not listened to contemptible fallacies of self-indulgence and indolence, and then cheated ourselves into believing them the sober testimonies of conscience?