inaking any impious alterations in a tabernacle, chapel, temple, or any other
building used for purposes of worship. The majority in these august bodies
asserted that their ancestors had prayed and sung there for a century and a
quarter, and what was good enough for their ancestors was entirely suitable
for them. Besides, the community was becoming less and less prosperous, and
church-going was growing more and more lamentably uncommon, so that even from
a business standpoint, any sums expended upon decoration by a poor and
struggling parish would be worse than wasted.

In the particular year under discussion in this story, the valiant and
progressive Mrs. Jeremiah Burbank was the president of the Dorcas Society, and
she remarked privately and publicly that if her ancestors liked a smoky
church, they had a perfect right to the enjoyment of it, but that she did n't
intend to sit through meeting on winter Sundays, with her white ostrich
feather turning gray and her eyes smarting and watering, for the rest of her
natural life.

Whereupon, this being in a business session, she then and there proposed to
her already hypnotized constituents ways of earning enough money to build a
new chimney on the other side of the church.

An awe-stricken community witnessed this beneficent act of vandalism, and,
finding that no thunderbolts of retribution descended from the skies, greatly
relished the change. If one or two aged persons complained that they could not
sleep as sweetly during sermon-time in the now clear atmosphere of the church,
and that the parson's eye was keener than before, why, that was a mere detail,
and could not be avoided; what was the loss of a little sleep compared with
the discoloration of Mrs. Jere Burbank's white ostrich feather and the
smarting of Mrs. Jere Burbank's eyes?