of Eden, and they do wear enough to
cover their nakedness, and that's more than some of our fashionable
wimmen do, and 'tennyrate they don't suffer so much as our wimmen do
with their torturin' tight shoes and steel instruments of agony bound
round their waists, compressin' their vital organs into a mass of
deformity."

Elder Wessel wuz so browbeat that he kinder got offen his subject, and
with a dazed look he murmured sunthin' about "the wicked religion of
Cuba when the Americans took it--the Papal indulgences, the cruel bull
fights, the national recreations--you could always tell the low state
of a nation's civilization by the brutish recreations they indulged
in."

Sez Arvilly, in a loud, mad axent, "Talk about brutal amusements, why
they ort to send missionaries to America to reform us as fur up in
decency as to use animals to fight fur our recreation instead of human
bein's. Bulls hain't spozed to have immortal souls, and think how
America pays two men made in the image of God so much an hour--high
wages, too--to beat and pound and maim and kill each other for the
amusement of a congregation of Christian men and wimmen, who set and
applaud and howl with delight when a more cruel blow than common fells
one on 'em to the earth. And then our newspapers fight it all over for
the enjoyment of the family fireside, for the wimmen and children and
invalids, mebby, that couldn't take in the rare treat at first sight.
Every blow, every cruel bruise that wuz made in the suffering flesh
reproduced for Sunday reading. And if one of the fighters is killed
and his mangled body taken out of the fighting ring forever, taken
home to his wife and children with the comfortin' peticulars that he
wuz killed for the amusement of men and wimmen, most on 'em church
members, and all citizens of our Christian republic by special license
of the government, why then the newspapers, which are the exponents of
our civilization and the teachers of our youth, have a splendid time
relating the ghastly story under staring headlines. After all this,
talk to me about our country's dastin to have the face to reform any
other country's amusement. Our prize fights that our nation gives
licenses for its people to enjoy are as much worse than bull fights,
in view of America's professions of goodness, as it would be for an
angel to fly down 'lection day amongst a drunken crowd and git drunk
as a fool, and stagger round and act with her wings dirty and
a-