gets his coat and never
says thirty-five cents to the conductor, or ten cents to the porter. Do
you think a gospel car would catch him for half a dollar? He would see you
in Hades first.
The best way is to take a little eighteen-carat religion along into the
smoking car, or any other car you may happen to be in.
A man--as we understand religion from those who have had it--does not have
to howl to the accompaniment of an asthmatic organ, pumped by a female
with a cinder in her eye and smut on her nose, in order to enjoy religion,
and he does not have to be in the exclusive company of other pious people
to get the worth of his money. There is a great deal of religion in
sitting in a smoking car, smoking dog-leg tobacco in a briar-wood pipe,
and seeing happy faces in the smoke that curls up--faces of those you have
made happy by kind words, good deeds, or half a dollar put where it will
drive away hunger, instead of paying it out for a reserved seat in a
gospel car. Take the half dollar you would pay for a seat in a gospel car
and go into the smoker, and find some poor emigrant that is going west to
grow up with the country, after having been beaten out of his money at
Castle Garden, and give it to him, and see if the look of thankfulness and
joy does not make you feel better than to listen to a discussion in the
gospel car, as to wheiher the children of Israel went through the Red Sea
with life-preservers, or wore rubber hunting boots.
Take your gospel-car half dollar and buy a vegetable ivory rattle of the
train boy, and give it to the sick emigrant mother's pale baby, and you
make four persons happy--the baby, the mother, the train boy and yourself.
We know a man who gave a dollar to a prisoner on the way to State prison,
to buy tobacco with, who has enjoyed more good square religion over it
than he could get out of all the chin music and saw-filing singing he
could hear in a gospel car in ten years. The prisoner was a bad man from
Oshkosh, who was in a caboose in charge of the sheriff, on the way to
Waupun. The attention of the citizen was called to the prisoner by his
repulsive appearance, and his general don't-care-a-damative appearance.
The citizen asked the prisoner how he was fixed for money to buy tobacco
with in prison. He said he hadn't a cent, and he knew it would be the
worst punishment he could have to go without tobacco. The citizen gave him
the dollar and said:
"Now, every time you take a chew of
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