"A shilling, gentlemen, if you please, to help build the new Methodist
church."

Blessed sound! Holy sound! We contribute with thankful avidity to the
new Methodist church, and are happy to think how lucky it was that those
little colored Sunday-school scholars did not seize upon everything we
had with violence, before we recovered from our momentary helpless
condition. By the light of cigars we write down the names of weightier
philanthropists than ourselves on the contribution cards, and then pass
on into the farther darkness, saying, What sort of a government do they
call this, where they allow little black pious children, with
contribution cards, to plunge out upon peaceable strangers in the dark
and scare them to death?

We prowled on several hours, sometimes by the seaside, sometimes inland,
and finally managed to get lost, which is a feat that requires talent in
Bermuda. I had on new shoes. They were No. 7's when I started, but were
not more than 5's now, and still diminishing. I walked two hours in
those shoes after that, before we reached home. Doubtless I could have
the reader's sympathy for the asking. Many people have never had the
headache or the toothache, and I am one of those myself; but every body
has worn tight shoes for two or three hours, and known the luxury of
taking them off in a retired place and seeing his feet swell up and
obscure the firmament. Once when I was a callow, bashful cub, I took a
plain, unsentimental country girl to a comedy one night. I had known her
a day; she seemed divine; I wore my new boots. At the end of the first
half-hour she said, "Why do you fidget so with your feet?" I said, "Did
I?" Then I put my attention there and kept still. At the end of another
half-hour she said, "Why do you say, 'Yes, oh yes!' and 'Ha, ha, oh,