ll, in the manner of Mark
Twain. "Aw, my dear soul!" she exclaims. "How yu du go on! Aw, my dear
soul! Yu'm going to hell, sure 'nuff yu be!"

[Sidenote: _AGNOSTICISM_]

But her horror is only a pretence. She does not take such matters
seriously. Indeed, few things have surprised me so much as the
thoroughgoing agnosticism that prevails here. Uncle Jake is the
religious member of the Widger family. For the rest, religion is the
business of the clergy who are paid for it and of those who take it up
as a hobby, including the impertinent persons who thrust hell-fire
tracts upon the fisherfolk. "Us can't 'spect to know nort about it,"
says Tony. "'Tain't no business o' ours. May be as they says; may be
not. It don't matter, that I sees. 'Twill be all the same in a hunderd
years' time when we'm a-grinning up at the daisy roots."

Nevertheless, he is not atheistical, nor even wholly fatalistic. When
his first wife was lying dead, he saw her in a dream with one of her
dead babies in her arms, and he is convinced that that meant something
very spiritual, although what it meant he does not care to enquire. The
agnosticism refers not so much to immortality or the existence of a
God, as to the religions, the nature of the God, the divinity of
Christ, and so on.

"Us don' know nort about that, n'eet does anybody else, I believe, an'
all their education on'y muddles 'em when they comes to weigh up thic
sort o' thing."

[Sidenote: _SPARROWISM_]

If the sparrows themselves had been acquainted with 'Are not two
sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the
ground without your Father,' their attitude towards religion might have
resembled Tony's--a mixture of trust and _insouciance_, neither of
them driven to any logical conclusion and both tempered by fatalism.
"When yu got to die, yu got tu," says Tony, and it makes little
difference to him whether the event has been decreed since the
beginning of time, or whether it is to be decreed at some future date
by a being so remote as God. The thing is, to accept the decree
courageously.

The children go to Sunday School, of course; it is convenient to have
them out of the way while Sunday's dinner is being cooked and the
afternoon snooze being taken. Besides, though the Sunday School
teaching is a fearful hotch-potch of heaven, hell and self-interest,
the tea-fights concerts and picnics connected with it are well worth
going to. But the household religion remai