congregation, none of which had ever been noticed before in this place.
Our clergyman was amazed and horrified. He tried to ignore the action of
the brethren, but when a sister who has grown old in our church, and been
such a model and example of rectitude that all the girls in the county
were perfectly discouraged about trying to be anywhere near equal to her;
when she rose with a wild snort, got up on the pew with her feet, and
swung her parasol in a way that indicated that she would not go home till
morning, he paused and briefly wound up the services.

Of course there were other little eccentricities on the part of the
congregation, but these were the ones that people have talked about the
most, and have done us the most damage abroad.

Now, my desire is that through the medium of the press you will state that
this great trouble which has come upon us, by reason of which the ungodly
have spoken lightly of us, was not the result of a general tendency to
dissent from the statements made by our pastor, and therefore an
exhibition of our disapproval of his doctrines, but that the janitor had
started a light fire in the furnace, and that had revived a large nest of
common, streaked, hot-nosed wasps in the warm air pipe, and when they came
up through the register and united in the services, there was more or less
of an ovation.

Sometimes Christianity gets sluggish and comatose, but not under the above
circumstances. A man may slumber on softly with his bosom gently rising
and falling, and his breath coming and going through one corner of his
mouth like the death rattle of a bath-tub, while the pastor opens out a
new box of theological thunders and fills the air full of the sullen roar
of sulphurous waves, licking the shores of eternity and swallowing up the
great multitudes of the eternally lost; but when one little wasp, with a