If the minister had been a younger and more tactful man the argument which followed might have ended pleasantly and the break have been avoided.  But the clergyman was elderly, as set in his ways as the Captain was in his, and the disagreement was absolute and final.

“The feller is a regular wooden-head,” declared Shadrach, hotly.  “I was willin’ to be reasonable; I was willin’ to give in that this Jonah man might have been out of his head and, after he was hove overboard and cast ashore, thought he’d been swallowed by a whale or somethin’ or ’nother.  I picked up a sailor once who’d drifted around in a boat for a week and he couldn’t remember nothin’ of what happened after the first day or so.  If you’d told him he’d been swallowed by a mackerel he wouldn’t have said no.  But I’ve helped kill a good many whales—­yes, and I’ve helped cut ’em up, too—­and I know what they look like inside.  No man, whether his name was Jonah or Jehoshaphat, could have lived three days in a whale’s stomach.  How’d he breathe in there, eh?  Cal’late the whale had ventilators and a skylight in his main deck?  How’d the whale live all that time with a man hoppin’ ’round inside him?  Think I’d live if I—­if I swallowed a live mouse or somethin’?  No, sir-ee!  Either that mouse would die or I would, I bet you!  I’ve seen a whole parcel of things took out of a whale’s insides and some of the things had been alive once, too; but they wasn’t alive then; they was in chunks and part digested.  Jonah wasn’t digested, was he?  And the whale wasn’t dead of dyspepsy neither.  That’s what I told that minister.  ’You try it yourself,’ I says to him.  ’There’s whales enough back of the Crab Ledge, twenty mile off Orham,’ said I.  ’You’re liable to run in sight of ’em most any fair day in summer.  You go off there and jump overboard some time and see what happens.  First place, no whale would swallow you; next place, if it did ’twould chew you or sift you fine first; and, third place, if you was whole and alive that whale would be dead inside of ten minutes.  You try it and see.’  Good fair offer, wasn’t it?  But did he take it up?  Not much.  Said I was a scoffer and an infidel and didn’t know anything about Scripture!  ‘I know about whales, anyhow,’ I told him.  And he slammed off and wouldn’t speak to me again.  Don’t talk to me!  I’ll never go inside that meetin’-house again.”

And he never had until Mary-’Gusta coaxed him into it.  She was a regular attendant at Sunday school, but on Sunday mornings in pleasant weather she had been accustomed to take a walk with Shadrach.  These walks they both enjoyed hugely, but one bright morning she announced that she was not going for a walk, but was going to church with Uncle Zoeth.  Shadrach was disappointed and astonished.

“Land sakes!  What’s this mean?” he demanded.  “Thought you liked to walk with me.”

“I do.  I like it very much.  But I don’t think it’s fair for me to do it every Sunday.  Uncle Zoeth always goes to church and he feels real bad ’cause you don’t go.  He told me so.  He says the church folks think you won’t go to Heaven when you die and that makes him feel dreadful.  He’s goin’ to Heaven, you know.”