to see the remains please step this way.’ It always gives me the horrible impression that I am about to view the scene of a cannibal feast.”
“Well, all I hope,” said Miss Cornelia calmly, “is that when I’m dead nobody will call me ‘our departed sister.’ I took a scunner at this sister-and-brothering business five years ago when there was a travelling evangelist holding meetings at the Glen. I hadn’t any use for him from the start. I felt in my bones that there was something wrong with him. And there was. Mind you, he was pretending to be a Presbyterian—Presbytarian, he called it—and all the time he was a Methodist. He brothered and sistered everybody. He had a large circle of relations, that man had. He clutched my hand fervently one night, and said imploringly, ‘My dear sister Bryant, are you a Christian?’ I just looked him over a bit, and then I said calmly, ‘The only brother I ever had, Mr. Fiske, was buried fifteen years ago, and I haven’t adopted any since. As for being a Christian, I was that, I hope and believe, when you were crawling about the floor in petticoats.’ That squelched him, believe me. Mind you, Anne dearie, I’m not down on all evangelists. We’ve had some real fine, earnest men, who did a lot of good and made the old sinners squirm. But this Fiske-man wasn’t one of them. I had a good laugh all to myself one evening. Fiske had asked all who were Christians to stand up. I didn’t, believe me! I never had any use for that sort of thing. But most
