CHAPTER XXI.
THE SERMON.
I GUESS Jobe and me are goners. Jobe is nearly broken-hearted, and I feel kind a faint like. We will have to go to hell. Our preacher says so.
Last Sunday Jobe wanted me to go to meetin. I said Ide go. So I jist put on that hat I got from Jane Summers, and the blue cambric dress I have wore now for some three years, and we hitched poor old crippled Tom to the spring wagon and we went.
We tied Tom under a shade tree jist outside of town and walked in.
They was singin when we got there. As we walked up the ile of that big Methodist church, crowded full of leadin men and women, they pinted and whispered and snickered at my straw hat and Jobe’s linen coat, with a muslin patch on the sleeve, till I was really ashamed of some of them. High-toned people do sometimes act so silly that its shockin.
Well, the preacher took a hard text to preach from.
It was about Jesus tellin a young feller “to go sell all he had and give it to the poor.”
I thought the preacher had his foot in it the minit he read that text.
But then he got out of it in a way that cast a gloom over Jobe and me. He went on to explain that Jesus dident mean what he said; that he was jist a jokin with the feller.
He said Jesus wanted to make a preacher out of the young man, and he told him that jist to try him; but when he told him to do that the young feller went off sorry and dident go to preachin.