e heard a good deal of this same dread of drink in
Musquash, and even the maidens seemed to know too much about its effects
upon certain unregenerate youths, who, if they had been once made
thoroughly, effectually, and persistently drunk--with a tepid brandy and
soda thrust before their goose-fleshed noses on the terrible Next
Morning--would perhaps have seen the futility of their ways. It was a
sin by village canons to imbibe lager, though--_experto crede_--you can
get dropsy on that stuff long before you can get drunk. "But what man
knows his mind?" Besides, it was all their own affair.

The little community seemed to be as self-contained as an Indian
village. Had the rest of the land sunk under the sea, Musquash would
have gone on sending its sons to school in order to make them "good
citizens," which is the constant prayer of the true American father,
settling its own road-making, local cesses, town-lot arbitrations, and
internal government by ballot and vote and due respect to the voices of
the headmen (which is the salvation of the ballot), until such time as
all should take their places in the cemetery appointed for their faith.
Here were Americans and no aliens--men ruling themselves by themselves
and for themselves and their wives and their children--in peace, order,
and decency.

But what went straightest to this heart, though they did not know it,
was that they were Methody folk for the most part--ay, Methody as ever
trod a Yorkshire Moor, or drove on a Sunday to some chapel of the Faith
in the Dales. The old Methody talk was there, with the discipline
whereby the souls of the Just are, sometimes to their intense vexation,
made perfect on this earth in order that they may "take out their
letters and live and die in good standing." If you don't know the talk,
you won't know what that means. The discipline, or dis_cip_line, is no
thing to be trifled with, and its working among a congregation depends
entirely upon the tact, humanity, and sympathy of the leader who works
it. He, knowing what youth's desires are, can turn the soul in the
direction of good, gently, instead of wrenching it savagely towards the
right path only to see it break away quivering and scared. The arm of
the Dis_cip_line is long. A maiden told me, as a new and strange fact
and one that would interest a foreigner, of a friend of hers who had
once been admonished by some elders somewhere--not in Musquash--for the
heinous crime of dancing. She