iss Cornelia grimly.

"Besides," continued wicked Captain Jim, "I wanted to hear some good
singing. The Methodists have a good choir; and you can't deny,
Cornelia, that the singing in our church is awful since the split in
the choir."

"What if the singing isn't good? They're doing their best, and God
sees no difference between the voice of a crow and the voice of a
nightingale."

"Come, come, Cornelia," said Captain Jim mildly, "I've a better opinion
of the Almighty's ear for music than THAT."

"What caused the trouble in our choir?" asked Gilbert, who was
suffering from suppressed laughter.

"It dates back to the new church, three years ago," answered Captain
Jim. "We had a fearful time over the building of that church--fell out
over the question of a new site. The two sites wasn't more'n two
hundred yards apart, but you'd have thought they was a thousand by the
bitterness of that fight. We was split up into three factions--one
wanted the east site and one the south, and one held to the old. It
was fought out in bed and at board, and in church and at market. All
the old scandals of three generations were dragged out of their graves
and aired. Three matches was broken up by it. And the meetings we had
to try to settle the question! Cornelia, will you ever forget the one
when old Luther Burns got up and made a speech? HE stated his opinions
forcibly."

"Call a spade a spade, Captain. You mean he got red-mad and raked them
all, fore and aft. They deserved it too--a pack of incapables. But
what would you expect of a committee of men? That building committee
held twenty-seven meetings, and at the end of the twenty-seventh
weren't no nearer having a church than when they begun--not so near,
for a fact, for in one fit of hurrying things along they'd gone to work
and tore the old church down, so there we were, without a church, and
no place but the hall to worship in."

"The Methodists offered us their church, Cornelia."

"The Glen St. Mary church wouldn't have been built to this day," went
on Miss Cornelia, ignoring Captain Jim, "if we women hadn't just
started in and took charge. We said WE meant to have a church, if the
men meant to quarrel till doomsday, and we were tired of being a
laughing-stock for the Methodists. We held ONE meeting and elected a
committee and canvassed for subscriptions. We got them, too. When any
of the men tried to sass us we told them they'd tried for two years to
bui