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"God can use very ignorant Hardshell preachers in building up his kingdom if their own hearts are right before him," said Jasper Very; "but if they are imposters, they are a disgrace and injury to the sacred calling. "I met a fellow once across the Ohio River whose name was Sargent. He assumed the name of Halycon Church, and proclaimed himself the millennial messenger.
"Spotty's shell is all one piece, but the Armadillo's shell is jointed, so that he can roll up like a ball. Spotty isn't a mammal, as are all of you and all those we have been learning about, but is a reptile. Hardshell the Armadillo, on the other hand, is a true mammal." "Well, all I can say is that he must be a mighty queer looking fellow," declared Peter. "He is," replied Old Mother Nature.
Brer B'ar, he say he de mos' stronges', but Brer Tarrypin he rock, en he keep on rockin'. Bimeby he sorter shet one eye, en say, sezee: "'Hit look like 'periently dat de ole hardshell ain't nowhars 'longside er dis crowd, yit yer I is, en I'm de same man w'at show Brer Rabbit dat he ain't de swiffes'; en I'm de same man w'at kin show Brer B'ar dat he ain't de stronges', sezee.
Hardshell the Armadillo is one of these. He has no teeth at all in the front of his mouth and such teeth as he has got do not amount to much." "But why do you call him Hardshell?" asked Peter impatiently. "Because instead of a coat of fur he wears a coat of shell," replied Old Mother Nature, and then laughed right out at the funny expressions on the faces before her.
Pellams had the old man singing now, in a cracked, maudlin voice, and his keeper was beating time with a billiard cue. Then the amateur conductor had one of his inspirations. "Hey, a trio! The event of the evening! General Hardshell Jackson, Señor Lupe de Tamale, and the renowned lyric barytone, James Russell Lowell Mason, will combine in a grand farewell concert.
I'm trying to remember what led me into the fray in the incongruous company of certain Hardshell Baptists, Ontario Methodists, and Belfast Presbyterians. As a young man, my sympathies were with the advanced Anglicans, perhaps because my people were sternly Evangelical. Then the whole thing's unreasonable what have I to do, for instance, with the Protestant succession?"
"By and by Angus had some money saved up, and what should he do with bits of it now and then but grubstake old Snowstorm Hickey, who'd been scratching mountainsides all his life and never found a thing and likely never would a grouchy old hardshell with white hair and whiskers whirling about his head in such quantities that a body just naturally called him Snowstorm without thinking.
Some people think the "Hardshells" a myth, and some sensitive Baptist people at the East resent all allusion to them. But the "Hardshell Baptists," or, as they are otherwise called, the "Whisky Baptists," and the "Forty-gallon Baptists," exist in all the old Western and South-western States. They call themselves "Anti-means Baptists" from their Antinomian tenets.
This writer has attended a Sunday-school, the superintendent of which was solemnly arraigned and expelled from the Hardshell Church for "meddling with God's business" by holding a Sunday-school. Of course the Hardshells are prodigiously illiterate, and often vicious. Some of their preachers are notorious drunkards. They sing their sermons out sometimes for three hours at a stretch .
Some of the mining properties, now nearly all temporarily closed down, are world-famous I quote for example the Three R., the World's Fair, the Flux, the Santa Cruz, the Hardshell, the Harshaw, the Hermosa, the Montezuma, the Mansfield and the Mowry. This last, nine miles from Patagonia, was a producer long before the Civil War.
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