Sunday-school superintendent to talk, but,' says he, 'jest give
me a little time, and I'll git the hang o' this superintendent
business.' Says he, 'When a Presbyterian's been without a church of
his own for three years and been driftin' around loose amongst the
Methodists and the Babtists, you've got to make some allowance for
him.'

"Well, after he'd got the Sunday-school and the weekly prayer-meetin'
started, and all the church-members comin' regular to preachin', and
everything runnin' smooth, Brother Wilson set about havin' the church
built.

"The way they build churches now, child, is mighty different from the
way they used to build 'em. Now nobody gives anything but money. It's
money, money, money, every which way you turn. But in the olden time
the way they built a church was like the way the Israelites built the
tabernacle. You ricollect the Bible says, 'Every one whose heart
stirred him up, and every one whom his spirit made willing, brought an
offering to the Lord.' The rich men brought gold and silver, and the
rulers brought onyx stones and oil and incense, and the poor men
brought wood for the tabernacle and goats' skins and rams' skins, and
the women they spun and wove and made purple and scyarlet cloth and
fine linen. There wasn't anybody so poor that he couldn't give
somethin' if his heart and his spirit was willin'. And that's the way
it was when that Presbyterian church was built in the old time.

"The folks that was called rich then would be called poor nowadays,
and a man's riches wasn't always money. But if one man had a
sand-bank, he'd give sand for the mortar, and if another had good
clay for makin' bricks, he'd give the clay, and somebody else that
owned slaves'd give the labor--so many days' work--and there'd be the
bricks for the walls; and if a church-member was a cyarpenter, he'd
give so much of his time and his work, jest like the 'wise-hearted
men' that worked on the tabernacle and made the curtains and the
cherubims and the sockets of silver and brass and all the rest of the
things that Moses commanded 'em to make.

"I reckon that old subscription paper'd look mighty strange nowadays.
I ricollect one of the members said he'd give fifty dollars in cotton
yarn at the price it was sellin' at in the stores; another said he'd
give a hundred acres o' land in Monroe County; and another one give a
hundred acres o' land 'way up in Illinois. One o' the elders said he'd
give twenty-five dollars i