we do as we
would be done by, and that while we were mad, and sassy, and full of
fight, eighteen years ago, we want to be friends, and shake hands
over the respective graves of our loved ones, and quit making fools of
ourselves.

*****

A Ridiculous scene occurred a Palmyra, the other day. The furnace in the
basement of the church is reached by a trap door, which is right beside
the pulpit. There was a new preacher there from abroad, and he did not
know anything about the trap door, and the sexton went down there to
fix the fire, before the new minister arrived. The minister had just got
warmed up in his sermon, and was picturing to his hearers hell in all
its heat. He had got excited and told of the lake of burning brimstone
below, where the devil was the stoker, and where the heat was ten
thousand times hotter than a political campaign, and where the souls of
the wicked would roast, and fry, and stew until the place froze over.

Wiping the perspiration from his face, he said, pointing to the floor,
"Ah, my friends, look down into that seething, burning lake, and--" Just
at this point the trap door raised a little, and the sexton's face,
with coal smut all over it, appeared. He wanted to come up and hear the
sermon.

If hell had broke loose, the new minister could not have been more
astonished. He stepped back, grasped his manuscript, and was just about
to jump from the pulpit, when a deacon on the front seat said, "It's all
right, brother, he has only _been down below to see about the fire._"
The sexton came up and shut down the trap door, the color came back to
the face of the minister, and he went on, though the incident seemed to
take the tuck all out of him.

A traveling man who happened to be at the church tells us that he knows
the minister was scared, for he sweat so that the perspiration run right
down on the carpet and made a puddle as though a dipper of water had
been tipped over there. The minister says he was not scared, but we
don't see how he could help it.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Peck's Sunshine, by George W. Peck

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