A new furnace followed the new chimney, in due course, and as a sense of
comfort grew, there was opportunity to notice the lack of beauty. Twice in
sixty years had some well-to-do summer parishioner painted the interior of the
church at his own expense; but although the roof had been many times
reshingled, it had always persisted in leaking, so that the ceiling and walls
were disfigured by unsightly spots and stains and streaks. The question of
shingling was tacitly felt to be outside the feminine domain, but as there
were five women to one man in the church membership, the feminine domain was
frequently obliged to extend its limits into the hitherto unknown. Matters of
tarring and waterproofing were discussed in and out of season, and the very
school-children imbibed knowledge concerning lapping, over-lapping, and
cross-lapping, and first and second quality of cedar shingles. Miss Lobelia
Brewster, who had a rooted distrust of anything done by mere man, created
strife by remarking that she could have stopped the leak in the belfry tower
with her red flannel petticoat better than the Milltown man with his
new-fangled rubber sheeting, and that the last shingling could have been more
thoroughly done by a "female infant babe"; whereupon the person criticized
retorted that he wished Miss Lobelia Brewster had a few infant babes to "put
on the job he'd like to see 'em try." Meantime several male members of the
congregation, who at one time or another had sat on the roof during the
hottest of the dog-days to see that shingling operations were conscientiously
and skillfully performed, were very pessimistic as to any satisfactory result
ever being achieved.

"The angle of the roof--what they call the 'pitch'--they say that that's
always been wrong," announced the secretary of the Dorcas in a business
session.

"Is it that kind of pitch that the Bible says you can't touch without being
defiled? If not, I vote that we unshingle the roof and alter the pitch!" This