parsonage, a woman dressed poorly, and whose pained face makes his heart
ache, and she tells him a tale of woe, and he goes to his wife and gets
a basket of stuff out of the kitchen to give her, a kitchen not stocked
any too well, and sends her home with immediate relief, and then goes
out to hunt up the relief committee of his church to give the woman
permanent relief. He comes back after a while and finds other callers,
some to have him make a diagnosis of their souls, over which they are
worrying, another to have him help get a son out of the police station,
who used to belong to the Sunday-school, and one man wants him to preach
a funeral sermon in the afternoon. He gets out of the police station in
time for the funeral, and they make him go clear to the cemetery, and
stop at the house with the mourners on the way back, and he gets a cold
dinner that night, and has to call on several sick friends that evening,
and one of them is so nearly gone that he remains with him to the last,
and gets home at midnight. The other days of the week are the same, only
more so, and in addition he has to run a prayer meeting, several society
meetings, a sociable, settle a quarrel in the choir, and bring two
members of the church together who have not spoken to each other for
months, attend a ministers' meeting and map out a plan of campaign
against the old boy, run out into the country to preach a little for
a neighboring preacher who is sick, or off on a vacation, attend a
missionary meeting, marry a few couples, and prepare two sermons for
Sunday forenoon and evening, sermons that are new, and on texts that
have not been preached on before. One night in the week he can get on
his slippers and sit in the library, and the other nights he is running
from one place to another to make a lot of other people happier, and he
has more sickness at home than any man in his congregation, and he works
harder than the man who digs in the sewer, and half the time the people
kick on his salary and wonder why he doesn't do more, and say he looks
so dressed up it can't be possible he has much to do, and when he gets
worn down to the bone, and his cheeks are sunken, and his voice fails,
and his step is not so active, they saw him off on to some country
church that never did pay a minister enough to live on, and he never
kicks, but just keeps on praying for them until he kicks the bucket,
when he ought to give them a piece of his mind. How do you like