ice is
read in an Episcopal church the congregation shouts the responses,
quietly, of course, and by the book, but it is shouting just the same,
and with a beseeching use of words both joyful and agonizing that
surpasses any sporadic shouting of the Methodists.

After the sermon we had dinner on the grounds, for this was an all-day
meeting with another service at the end of the day. And Saturday
dinner on the grounds of a Methodist church thirty years ago was a
function that appealed to the threefold nature of man as nothing else I
have ever seen did. Socially speaking, all the best people in the
community were present; the real best people, you understand.
Spiritually, it was an occasion hallowed by grave conversation; for
were we not within the shadow of God's house, in the sacred presence of
the dead? It was gruesome if you had an Episcopalian temperament, but
certainly it conduced to good breeding and sobriety. But, more
particularly, there was the dinner itself set out of huge hampers on
white cloths that appealed to the natural primitive man simply and
honestly, without a single pretense of delicacy to hide the real
grossness of the human appetite.

On this day plenty strewed the ground from Sister Glory White's basket
to Sister Amy Jurdon's and Sister Salter's. There were biscuit the
size of saucers and of the thickness of bread loaves, hams, baked hens,
roasted pigs, more biscuit, cucumber pickles six inches in length,
green-grape pies, custards of every kind and disposition, and cakes
that proclaimed the skill of every woman in the church.

William advised me to eat as I had never eaten before or the women
would think I did not like their cooking and would be correspondingly
offended. I was expected to consume at least three of the great
biscuit and everything else in proportion. Fortunately, I sat near a
tangle of vines in which I discovered a dog was hiding, a hound who
gazed imploringly at me through the leaves with the forlorn,
backslidden-sinner expression peculiar to his species, as much as to
say: "Don't tell I am here; maybe then I'll get a few crumbs later on."
I not only did not tell, but I fed him eight of the biscuit, five
slices of ham, and nearly everything else in reach of me except the
cucumber pickles. I never saw a dog eat more furtively or so well.

Meanwhile, I was raising for myself a monument more enduring than brass
in the hearts of my husband's people, as a hardy woman who co