PROPRIETY
There was a young lady of Wilts, Who walked up to Scotland on stilts; When they said it was shocking To show so much stocking, She answered: "Then what about kilts?"
--_Gilbert K. Chesterton_.
PROSPERITY
May bad fortune follow you all your days And never catch up with you.
PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH
One of our popular New England lecturers tells this amusing story.
A street boy of diminutive stature was trying to sell some very young kittens to passers-by. One day he accosted the late Reverend Phillips Brooks, asking him to purchase, and recommending them as good Episcopal kittens. Dr. Brooks laughingly refused, thinking them too small to be taken from their mother. A few days later a Presbyterian minister who had witnessed this episode was asked by the same boy to buy the same kittens. This time the lad announced that they were faithful Presbyterians.
"Didn't you tell Dr. Brooks last week that they were Episcopal kittens?" the minister asked sternly.
"Yes sir," replied the boy quickly, "but they's had their eyes opened since then, sir."
An Episcopal clergyman who was passing his vacation in a remote country district met an old farmer who declared that he was a "'Piscopal."
"To what parish do you belong?" asked the clergyman.
"Don't know nawthin' 'bout enny parish," was the answer.
"Who confirmed you, then?" was the next question.
"Nobody," answered the farmer.
"Then how are you an Episcopalian?" asked the clergyman.
"Well," was the reply, "you see it's this way: Last winter I went to church, an' it was called 'Piscopal, an' I heerd them say that they left undone the things what they'd oughter done and they'd done some things what they oughtenter done, and I says to myself says I: 'That's my fix exac'ly,' and ever sence then I've been a 'Piscopalian."
PROTESTANTS
A Protestant mission meeting had been held in an Irish town and this was the gardener's contribution to the controversy that ensued: "Pratestants!" he said with lofty scorn, "'Twas mighty little St. Paul thought of the Pratestants. You've all heard tell of the 'pistle he wrote to the Romans, but I'd ax ye this, did any of yez iver hear of his writing a 'pistle to the Pratestants?"
PROVIDENCE
"Why did papa have appendicitis and have to pay the doctor a thousand dollars, Mama?"
"It was God's will, dear."
"And was it because God was mad at papa or pleased with the doctor?"--_Life_.
There's a certain minister whose duties sometimes call him out of the city. He has always arranged for some one of his parishioners to keep company with his wife and little daughter during these absences.
Recently, however, he was called away so suddenly that he had no opportunity of providing a guardian.
The wife was very brave during the early evening, but after dark had fallen her courage began to fail. She stayed up with her little girl till there was no excuse for staying any longer and then took her upstairs to bed.
"Now go to sleep, Dearie," she said. "Don't be afraid. God will protect you."
"Yes, Mother," answered the little girl, "that'll be all right tonight, but next time let's make better arrangements."
PROVINCIALISM
Some time ago an English friend of Colonel W.J. Lampton's living in New York and having never visited the South, went to Virginia to spend a month with friends. After a fortnight of it, he wrote back:
"Oh, I say, old top, you never told me that the South was anything like I have found it, and so different to the North. Why, man, it's God's country."
The Colonel, who gets his title from Kentucky, answered promptly by postal.
"Of course it is," he wrote. "You didn't suppose God was a Yankee, did you?"
A southerner, with the intense love for his own district, attended a banquet. The next day a friend asked him who was present. With a reminiscent smile he replied: "An elegant gentleman from Virginia, a gentleman from Kentucky, a man from Ohio, a bounder from Chicago, a fellow from New York, and a galoot from Maine."
They had driven fourteen miles to the lake, and then rowed six miles across the lake to get to the railroad station, when the Chicago man asked:
"How in the world do you get your mail and newspapers here in the winter when the storms are on?"
"Wa-al, we don't sometimes. I've seen this lake thick up so that it was three weeks before we got a Chicago paper," answered the man from "nowhere."
"Well, you were cut off," said the Chicago man.
"Ya-as, we were so," was the reply. "Still, the Chicago folks were just as badly off."