Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/613

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1868.]
NEBULÆ.
579

Girl of the Period" would, perhaps, be a companion sketch of the "Boy"—and more than one woman in America, as well as in England, is able to draw the required pendant. Meanwhile, so potent always is the "Saturday's" battle cry, that a hundred gallant young knights have mounted their steeds, set their satiric pens in rest, and tilted right manfully for honor, and against ye ladyes. But, lacking its fierce intensity of hate, they mainly fall below their leader's mask. They descend to dreary boot-fitters' and man-milliners' statistics of "false calves," and to sermons on stays. To such pitiful ending comes their service in the "Saturday's" chivalrous crusade against woman.

To "hate women and America" is to hate what promises best for the world in the immediate future. It is the hatred of the cynic and the reactionist. In the century past, America has made more relative progress than other nations, and woman more relative progress than man—are these the objects of distrust and calumniation for the century to come?


The camp-meetings of the present season have illustrated more vividly than ever the great gain which the social feature in these institutions is making upon the religious. The latter, indeed, so far as figures tell the truth, holds its own or makes an advance; but the relative stride of the former is enormously greater, and if it keeps on, the day will soon come when much more attention will be paid to croquet than to conversions. We do not speak of this circumstance as an argument against the camp-meeting; on the contrary. We are aware, too, that the wise policy of the meeting is to surround it with such attractions of nature and society as to secure the attendance of the irreligious and the non-religious—and then to work upon their more serious emotions. If the young people have no amusement in prospect, it is argued, they will not come. They assemble for sport, but may get sobriety—"and those who came to scoff remained to pray." This, we say, is understood to be the theory of the meeting; meanwhile the salient fact is that the means have lately been gaining disproportionately with the end. The picnic element this year seems to have surpassed all others. The elaborate preparations for having a "good" time, the quantity of portable mechanism for amusements carried into the fields, the arrangements for fun and frolic, and the brisk competition between what leads away from the religious exercise and what draws toward it, is surely marked enough. However, the reporters on the daily press have sufficiently noted the exceedingly curious spectacle which has resulted from this fact. We do not claim that the two lines of attraction are incongruous; we know, too, that there has been a great difference between the different camp-meetings. And perhaps it will be answered that the very fact itself will draw larger crowds, and so further the grand object.


Speaking of camp-meetings, an authentic incident occurs to us illustrative of the very practical and personal turn which is sometimes given to their exercises. A brother who sometimes forgot in his daily vocations the spirit which ought to animate him, was once in the midst of an exhortation, and was narrating his own religious experiences, when a blunt old neighbor rose in the assembly and called out, "I hope Brother Conant, if he feels so much better, will not sell any more milk on Sunday morning!" "No," promptly rejoined Brother Conant, who, though taken aback, was equal to the occasion, "I a'n't a going to. I'm a going to sell my cow this week." It can hardly be said that this meeting was without visible result; and some of Brother Conant's customers who see this notice, and were surprised one Sunday morning by his disappearance from the street, may know now the reason.


On the programme of one of the September College Commencements, we observe a performance entitled "Liberty the Offspring of Oppression. An oration of the first class. Xenophon Demosthenes Tingley, North Providence." This is one of those names that make the laborious inventions of humorists in the same direction seem clumsy, and truth stranger than fiction. The very subject, too, is appropriate to the orator, and must have given assur-