It was he who finally put the very seal of confirmation upon both our
hopes and our fears.

The time was the evening of the same Sunday in whose afternoon his wife
had declined those transparent spelling-lessons. A certain preacher, noted
for his boldness, was drawing crowds by a series of sermons on the text
"Be thou clean," and our fat neighbor and his wife took us, all six, to
hear him. Their pew was well to the front and we were late, so that going
down the aisle unushered, with them in the lead--husband and spouse,
husband and spouse, four couples--we made a procession which became
embarrassingly amusing as the preacher simultaneously closed the Scripture
lesson with, "And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons'
wives with him into the ark."

That has been our fat neighbor's best joke ever since, though he always
says after it, "The poor Baron!" and often adds--"and poor Mrs.
Fontenette! Little did we think," etc. But he has never even suspected
their secret.

The entomologist was the last of our pew-full to give heed to the pulpit.
When the preacher said that because it was a year of state elections, for
which we ought already to be preparing, he had in his first discourse
touched upon political purity--cleanness of citizenship--the Baron showed
no interest. He still showed none when the speaker said again, that
because the pestilence was once more with us--that was in the terrible
visitation of 1878--he had devoted his second discourse to the hideous
crime of a great city whose voters and tax-payers do not enable and compel
it to keep the precept, "Be thou clean." I thought of the clean little
home from whose master beside me came no evidence that he thought at all.