Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 177, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 July 1910 — AN INTERRUPTED SERMON. [ARTICLE]

AN INTERRUPTED SERMON.

A boy is a*boy wherever or whenever he may s be, and the lad of the staid colonial days only helps to prove the fact. The parson in Helen Evertson Smith’s “Colonial Days and Ways” was of an unusually mild type, however, and extended his cloak of charity over the pranks of youth in a manner uncommon in those severe times. The minister, Mr. Smith, sheltered in the parsonage an orphan boy. One Sunday, for some reason or other, this lad was kept from church. While the sermon was in progress a chuckle ran round the gallery where the boys sat. Tliere was also a commotion in the top gallery, where the slaves were. Even the decorous tenants of the big, square pews seemed excited. The parson deoubled his efforts, but the disturbance increased. The preached stopped and looked round, with some displeasure, but more wonder. Everybody was looking In his direction, but not at him. His wife, with laughing eyes, was biting her lips. Old' slave Jack could stand it no longer. Making his way behind the seats, which were crowded with his brethren whose “ivories*’ were all exposed, he reached the end of the topmost gallery, and stepped on the flat top of the massive sounding-board which hung over the pulpit on a level with the top gallery floor. There he was in full view of the congregation, but hidden from the minister. In a moment, however, he came once more into the vision of that dignitary, carrying a very complacent black-and-tan dog decorated with a pair of the parson’s best bauds. Some hand had released Carlo from the durance in which he was kept Sundays in order that he might not follow his master, the minister, to church. Finding that he could not get into the house of worship by the doors, he had ascended the stairs leading to the top gallery, reached thei sounding-board and seated himself just above his master, well pleased with himself in his ministerial decorations. As Jack bore out the unresisting dog, the aggrieved old slave turned toward the minister, and breaking all meeting-house rules, exclaimed with irrepressible indignation: “Massa! massa! Dls some mo’ o’ dat Bill’s debiltry! He got to be stopped somehow!” This was too*much, and the congregation burst. into laughter. The parson laughed with the rest. Bidding Jack take off the dog’s finery apd carry him home, he turned to his audience and said that the little boy’s jest was not meant for irreverence, and that he was too young to realize what he was doing. Then he left the subject of his sermon, and gave such a discourse on the duties of the old and the young that every hearer wr»3 impressed.