FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 19:  Absurd as this speech seems, it is a literal transcript of words spoken in the author’s presence by a woman who, like Miss Hawkins, was born in Massachusetts.]

[Footnote 20:  When the first edition of this book appeared, the critic who analyzed the dialect in The Nation confessed that he did not know what to “crate” meant.  It was a custom in the days of early Indiana barbarism for the youngsters of a village, on spying a sleeping drunkard, to hunt up a “queensware crate”—­one of the cages of round withes in which crockery was shipped.  This was turned upside down over the inebriate, and loaded with logs or any other heavy articles that would make escape difficult when the poor wretch should come to himself.  It was a sort of rude punishment for inebriety, and it afforded a frog-killing delight to those who executed justice.]

CHAPTER XII.

THE HARDSHELL PREACHER.

“They’s preachin’ down to Bethel Meetin’-house to-day,” said the Squire at breakfast.  Twenty years In the West could not cure Squire Hawkins of saying “to” for “at.”  “I rather guess as how the old man Bosaw will give pertickeler fits to our folks to-day.”  For Squire Hawkins, having been expelled from the “Hardshell” church of which Mr. Bosaw was pastor, for the grave offense of joining a temperance society, had become a member of the “Reformers,” the very respectable people who now call themselves “Disciples,” but whom the profane will persist in calling “Campbellites.”  They had a church in the village of Clifty, three miles away.

I know that explanations are always abominable to story readers, as they are to story writers, but as so many of my readers have never had the inestimable privilege of sitting under the gospel as it is ministered in enlightened neighborhoods like Flat Creek, I find myself under the necessity—­need-cessity the Rev. Mr. Bosaw would call it—­of rising to explain.  Some people think the “Hardshells” a myth, and some sensitive Baptist people at the East resent all allusion to them.  But the “Hardshell Baptists,” or, as they are otherwise called, the “Whisky Baptists,” and the “Forty-gallon Baptists,” exist in all the old Western and South-western States.  They call themselves “Anti-means Baptists” from their Antinomian tenets.  Their confession of faith is a caricature of Calvinism, and is expressed by their preachers about as follows:  “Ef you’re elected, you’ll be saved; ef you a’n’t, you’ll be damned.  God’ll take keer of his elect.  It’s a sin to run Sunday-schools, or temp’rince s’cieties, or to send missionaries.  You let God’s business alone.  What is to be will be, and you can’t hender it.”  This writer has attended a Sunday-school, the superintendent of which was solemnly arraigned and expelled from the Hardshell Church for “meddling with God’s business” by holding a Sunday-school.  Of course the Hardshells are prodigiously illiterate, and often vicious.  Some of their preachers are notorious drunkards.  They sing their sermons out sometimes for three hours at a stretch[21].