Indeed, I wonder, when I think that a sensible people like
ours--really more attached to their clergy than they were in the lost
days, when the Mathers and Nortons were noblemen--should choose to
neutralize so much of their ministers' lives, and destroy so much of
their early training, by this undefined passion for seeing them in
public. It springs from our balancing of sects. If a spirited
Episcopalian takes an interest in the almshouse, and is put on the
Poor Board, every other denomination must have a minister there, lest
the poorhouse be changed into St. Paul's Cathedral. If a Sandemanian
is chosen president of the Young Men's Library, there must be a
Methodist vice-president and a Baptist secretary. And if a
Universalist Sunday-School Convention collects five hundred delegates,
the next Congregationalist Sabbath-School Conference must be as large,
"lest 'they'--whoever _they_ may be--should think 'we'--whoever _we_
may be--are going down."
Freed from these necessities, that happy year, I began to know my wife
by sight. We saw each other sometimes. In those long mornings, when
Dennis was in the study explaining to map-peddlers that I had eleven
maps of Jerusalem already, and to school-book agents that I would see
them hanged before I would be bribed to introduce their textbooks into
the schools--she and I were at work together, as in those old dreamy
days--and in these of our log-cabin again.
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