But Miss Yerden spoke up, and sez she—­

“I don’t care whether it is true or not.  I have always said, and always will say, that if any belief goes aginst the Bible, I had ruther believe in the Bible than in the truth any time.”

And more than half of us wimmen agreed with her.

You see, so many reverent, and holy, and divine thoughts and memories clustered round that book, that we didn’t love to have ’em disturbed.  It wuz like havin’ somebody take a spade and dig up the voyalets and lilies on the grave of the nearest and dearest, to try to prove sunthin’ or ruther.

We feel in such circumstances that we had ruther be mistook than to have them sweet posies disturbed and desecrated.

Holy words of counsel, and reproof, and consolation delivered from the Most High to His saints and prophets—­words that are whispered over our cradles, and whose truth enters our lives with our mother’s milk; that sustains us and helps us to bear the hard toils and burdens of the day of life, and that go with us through the Valley and the Shadow—­the only revelation we have of God’s will to man, the written testimony of His love and compassion, and the only map in which we trace our titles clear to a heavenly inheritance.

If errors and mistakes have crept in through the weaknesses of men, or if the pages have become blotted by the dust of time, we hated to have ’em brung out and looked too clost into—­we hated to, like a dog.

So we, most all of us, had a fellow feelin’ for Miss Yerden, and looked approvin’ at her.

And Lihu, seein’ we looked cold at him, and bein’ sensitive, and havin’ a hard cold, he said “he guessed he would go over to the drug-store and git some hoarhoun candy for his cough.”

So he went out.  And then Miss Cork spoke up, and sez she—­

“How it would look in the eyes of the other nations to have us a breakin’ Sundays after keepin’ ’em pure and holy for all these years.”

“Pure and holy!” sez Arvilly.  “Why, jest look right here in the country, and see the way the Sabbath is desecrated.  Saturday nights and Sundays is the very time for the devil’s high jinks.  More whiskey and beer and hard cider is consumed Saturday nights and Sundays than durin’ all the rest of the week.

“Why, right in my neighborhood a man who makes cider brandy carrys off hull barrels of it most every Saturday, so’s to have it ready for Sunday consumption.

“The saloons are crowded that day, and black eyes, and bruised bodies, and sodden intellects, and achin’ hearts are more frequent Sundays than any other day of the week, and you know it.

“And after standin’ all this desecration calmly for year after year, and votin’ to uphold it, it don’t look consistent to flare up and be so dretful afraid of desecratin’ the Sabbath by havin’ a place of education, greater than the world has ever seen or ever will see agin, open on the Sabbath for the youth of the land.”