“CALLED FOR THE MINISTER.”
“You remember what I said about the peculiar pattern of her ear-rings. It is through those ear-rings that the Methodist church lost its minister, and I became convinced that a female ministry is not a good thing to tie to. Miss Marsh and her admirer were driving quietly along and enjoying themselves in a perfectly respectable way, when one runner of the sleigh went over a good-sized log that had dropped from somebody’s load of wood and had been left in the road. The sleigh didn’t quite upset, but Miss Marsh was thrown against the lawyer with a shock for which she apologized, and he thanked her. But it happened that one of her ear-rings caught in the lawyer’s beard, and was so twisted up with it that it was impossible to disentangle it. Unless Miss Marsh was ready to drag about half her companion’s heard out by the roots, there was nothing to be done except for her to sit with her cheek close against his until some third person could manage to disentangle the ear-ring. While she was in this painful position—at least she said at the time that it was painful—a sleigh containing two of her deacons and a prominent Baptist drove by. Miss Marsh saw them and saw the horrified expression on their faces. She knew quick enough that her usefulness as a minister in New Berlinopolisville was at an end and that there was going to be a terrible scandal. So, being a woman, she burst into tears and said that she wished she were dead.
“But the lawyer was equal to the occasion. He told her that there was nothing left to be done except for them to be married and disentangled at the next town. Then he would take her on a long wedding-trip, stopping at Chicago to buy some clothes, and that if she so wished they would afterward settle in some other town, instead of coming back to New Berlinopolisville. Of course she said that the proposal was not to be thought of for a moment, and of course she accepted it within the next ten minutes. They drove to the house of the nearest minister, and the minister’s wife disentangled them, to save time, while the minister was engaged in marrying them.
“That was the end of the experiment of playing a woman-preacher on the boards of the First Methodist Church of Berlinopolisville. Everybody was content to call a man in the place of Miss Marsh, and everybody agreed to blame me for the failure of the experiment. I don’t know whether the lawyer ever had any reason to regret his marriage or not, but when I saw his wife at a fancy dress hall at Chicago, a year or two later, I could see that she was not sorry that she had given up the ministry. Ever since that time I have been opposed to women-preachers, and consider a woman in the pulpit as much out of place as a deacon in the ballet.”
A MYSTERY.
“Do I believe in spiritualism?” repeated the Colonel. “Well, you wouldn’t ask me that question if you knew that I had been in the business myself. I once ran a ‘Grand Spiritual Combination Show.’ I had three first-class mediums, who did everything, from knocking on a table to materializing Napoleon, or Washington, or any of your dead friends. It was a good business while it lasted, but, unfortunately, we showed one night in a Texas town before a lot of cowboys. One of them brought his lasso under his coat, and when the ghost of William Penn appeared the cowboy lassoed him and hauled him in, hand over hand, for further investigation. The language William Penn used drove all the ladies out of the place, and his want of judgment in tackling the cowboy cost him all his front teeth. I and the other mediums and the doorkeeper had to take a hand in the manifestation, and the result was that the whole Combination was locked up over-night, and the fines that we had to pay made me tired of spiritualism.