Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 November 1883 — The Sunday-School Picnic. [ARTICLE]

The Sunday-School Picnic.

It is a glad picnic party. The Sun-day-school had gone out into the leafy forest. The dark object in the heavens, 800 miles wide and 8,000 miles wide, is a cloud. It got to the woods as soon as the picnic, and is there yet. Under the great oak you can see the dinner. The large winter-proof mound in middle of the table sullenly laughing at the storm is a fruit cake. The teacher of the infant class made it herself for the little ones. But the storm saved them. See, the lightning struck the cake. It will never strike anything else. There stands the cake, without a dent, and under the table, shattered and blighted, lies the thunderbolt * Under the cedar tree is a dying dog. He got in the way and the superintendent felled him to the earth with one blow of a biscuit. The tall figure wrapped in the ghostly ’ drapery of a water-soaked linen-duster, leading the way to the cars, is the teacher of the young ladies’ Bible-class. His influence with that class is gone forever. The young ladies will never be able to look at him again without thinking how he looked on this occasion. Up in the hickory tree you see a grief-stricken face peering down. It is the superintendent, He climbed up there to fix the swing, and before they could throw him the rope the storm came up and the picnic adjourned sine die and sine mora. And he is waiting for the last straggler to disappear becomes he comes down. He has officiated at Sunday-school picnics often enough to know better than slide down a sheelbark hickory tree before an audience. The man with an umbrella under his arm is the treasurer. He is getting drenched, but he does not raise his umbrella. He knows there is a name paihted in the inside-of it, but for the life of him he cannot remembei; whose name it is. He is watching hig chance to give the umbrella to q stranger.— Burling ton Haivkeye.