“You ought to be a deacon in the First Church at Equity,” said Bartley.
“Is that so? Why?” asked Kinney.
“Oh, they don't believe in interfering with any man's religion, either.”
“Well,” said Kinney, thoughtfully, pausing with the rolling-pin in his hand, “there 'a such a thing as being too liberal, I suppose.”
“The world's tried the other thing a good while,” said Bartley, with cynical amusement at Kinney's arrest.
It seemed to chill the flow of the good fellow's optimism, so that he assented with but lukewarm satisfaction.
“Well, that's so, too,” and he made up the rest of his pies in silence.
“Well,” he exclaimed at last, as if shaking himself out of an unpleasant reverie, “I guess we shall get along, somehow. Do you like pork and beans?”
“Yes, I do,” said Bartley.
“We're goin' to have 'em for dinner. You can hit beans any meal you drop in on us; beans twenty-one times a week, just like pie. Set 'em in to warm,” he said, taking up a capacious earthen pot, near the stove, and putting it into the oven. “I been pretty much everywheres, and I don't know as I found anything for a stand-by that come up to beans. I'm goin' to give 'em potatoes and cabbage to-day,—kind of a boiled-dinner day,—but you'll see there aint one in ten 'll touch 'em to what there will these old residenters. Potatoes and cabbage'll do for a kind of a delicacy,—sort of a side-dish,—on-tree, you know; but give 'em beans for a steady diet. Why, off there in Chili, even, the people regularly live on beans,—not exactly like ours,—broad and flat,—but they're beans. Wa'n't there some those ancients—old Horace, or Virgil, may be—rung in something about beans in some their poems?”