n trees in the church--it was enough to make any dog
cross. To top it all, his mistress must come down sick, worried into
it all, as like as not, he had heard the doctor say. If Jack's
thoughts could have been put into words as he sat on the porch looking
moodily over the road, they would doubtless have taken something like
this shape, that it was a pity that men didn't have the sense of dogs,
but would bear grudges and make themselves and their betters unhappy.
And in the village there would have been more than one to agree with
him secretly.

Jack wouldn't have been any the wiser had he been told that the
trouble that had come to town was that of all things most worrisome, a
church quarrel. What was it about and how did it come? I doubt if any
of the men and women who strove in meeting for principle and
conscience with might and main, and said mean things about each other
out of meeting, could have explained it. I know they all would have
explained it differently, and so added fuel to the fire that was hot
enough already. In fact, that was what had happened the night before
Jack encountered his special friend, Deacon Jones, and it was in
virtue of his master's share in it that he had bestowed the memorable
kick upon him. Deacon Pratt was the valiant leader of the opposing
faction.

To the general stress of mind the holiday had but added another cause
of irritation. Could Jack have understood the ethics of men he would
have known that it strangely happens that:

"Forgiveness to the injured does belong,
But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong,"

and that everybody in a church quarrel having injured everybody else
within reach for conscience's sake, the season of good-will and even
the illness of that good woman, the wife of Deacon Pratt, admittedly
from worry over the trouble, practically put a settlement of it out
of the question. But being only a dog he did not understand. He could
only sulk; and as this went well enough with things as they were in
general, it proved that Jack was, as was well known, a very
intelligent dog.

He had yet to give another proof of it, that very day, by preaching to
the divided congregation its Christmas sermon, a sermon that is to
this day remembered in Brownville; but of that neither they nor he,
sitting there on the stoop nursing his grievances, had at that time
any warning.

It was Christmas Eve. Since the early Lutherans settled there, away
back in the last century