you know him?" she asked.

"Yes, indeed!" I said. "And you must know him, for he is one of our
deacons."

She never came back. Democracy like that was too much for her. The
deacon himself left our church a few months later because he
discovered that I did not believe in a literal hell of "fire and
brimstone," whatever that is.

The chairman of our trustees was a business man who was very much
engrossed with the New Thought. He saw a great future for me if I
would get "in tune with the infinite." I was more than willing. He
expounded to me the wonders of the new regime. Would I take lessons in
healing? Certainly! He paid an American Yogi a hundred dollars to
teach me. I was unaware of the cost. At first it was by
correspondence. His chirography looked like a plate of spaghetti. I
was instructed how to take a bath and when. The second letter ordered
me to sleep with my head to the East. I was "a Capricorner, buoyant,
lucky," so he said. At the end of a month I paid him a visit. He
showed me how to manipulate a patient--absent or present--and how to
charge!

The correspondence was taken verbatim from a ten-cent book on
astrology; I got tired, and handed the letters over to my wife. She
took them seriously, and when she had made what she thought was
progress she inadvertently told the chairman of the trustees. That
settled him. He resigned forthwith, and we saw him no more.

I thought we had reached the point where there was nothing further to
lose; but I was mistaken. I had been charged with being a Socialist,
and, curious to know what a Socialist was, I began to study the
subject. What I feared came upon me: I announced myself a Socialist.
That settled the Single Taxers; they left in a bunch! No, hardly in a
bunch; for two of them remained.

The Universalists invited us to use their church for our Sunday night
meetings. We thought that a fortunate windfall. We were to pay five
dollars a night. We did so until one week we had nothing to eat and we
let the rent wait. The trustees of the Universalist Church met and
passed a resolution something like this: "Resolved, that in order that
the good feeling existing between the People's Church and the
Universalist Church be maintained, that the People's Church be
requested to pay the rent after each service." We paid up and quit.

The most intelligent man in our church was a young draftsman in the
Winchester Arms Company. He was a man of boundless energy and great
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