ations are dying
of asphyxia. In the name of all the best interests of the church, I indict
one-half the sextons.

THE GOOD SEXTON.

He is the minister's blessing, the church's joy, a harbinger of the
millennium. People come to church to have him help them up the aisle. He
wears slippers. He stands or sits at the end of the church during an
impressive discourse, and feels that, though he did not furnish the ideas,
he at least furnished the wind necessary in preaching it. He has a quick
nostril to detect unconsecrated odors, and puts the man who eats garlic on
the back seat in the corner. He does not regulate the heat by a broken
thermometer, minus the mercury. He has the window blinds arranged just
right--the light not too glaring so as to show the freckles, nor too dark
so as to cast a gloom, but a subdued light that makes the plainest face
attractive. He rings the bell merrily for Christmas festival, and tolls it
sadly for the departed. He has real pity for the bereaved in whose house he
goes for the purpose of burying their dead--not giving by cold,
professional manner the impression that his sympathy for the troubled is
overpowered by the joy that he has in selling another coffin. He forgets
not his own soul; and though his place is to stand at the door of the ark,
it is surely inside of it. After a while, a Sabbath comes when everything
is wrong in church: the air is impure, the furnaces fail in their work, and
the eyes of the people are blinded with an unpleasant glare. Everybody
asks, "Where is our old sexton?" Alas! he will never come again. He has
gone to join Obededom and Berechiah, the doorkeepers of the ancient ark. He
will never again take the dusting; whisk from the closet under the church
stairs, for it is now with him "Dust to dust." The bell he so often rang
takes up its saddest tolling for him who used to pull it, and the minister
goes into his disordered and unswept pulpit, and finds the Bible upside
down as he takes it up to read his text in Psalms, 84th chapter and 10th
verse: "I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than to dwell
in the tents of wickedness!"

CHAPTER XV.

THE OLD CRADLE.

The historic and old-time cradle is dead, and buried in the rubbish of the
garret. A baby of five months, filled with modern notions, would spurn to
be rocked in the awkward and rustic thing. The baby spits the "Alexandra
feeding-bottle" out of its mouth, and protests against the old-fas