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Updated: May 18, 2025
'Ha! you sneaking hypocrite! he burst out in a grating voice, 'you threaten me ... you mean to have your revenge on me, do you? Do your worst! I've got the law on my side ... I know the law ... I'll hunt you down like a hare ... prove it ... prove that I was tampered with ... prove that I took the money ... prove it ... you can prove nothing ... you damned psalm-singing maggots! Janet!
"Yet I am blithe to see you," returned the honest Major; "we were informed yesterday that these psalm-singing rascals had a plot on your life, and I had mustered the scoundrelly dragoons ten minutes ago in order to beat up Burley's quarters and get you out of limbo, when the dog Inglis, instead of obeying me, broke out into open mutiny. But what is to be done now?"
Some chose to despise this quality as a tendency to "psalm-singing"; others saw in it the inherited qualities of the parent, and were ready to prophesy for the son the same hard old age. But all agreed that it was not inconsistent with the habits of money-getting, for which father and son were respected. And yet, the old man did not seem to be happy.
"Off with you, for a hypocritical, psalm-singing, canting rogue in disguise," said Mason scornfully. "By the life of Washington! it worries an honest fellow to see such voracious beasts of prey ravaging a country for which he sheds his blood. If I had you on a Virginia plantation for a quarter of an hour, I'd teach you to worm the tobacco with the turkeys."
He never suspects that all the psalm-singing he joins in, and the sermons he hears, and the other means he is using, are only as the exercise and the evolutions of the soldiers, to fit and prepare him for actual service; and that these means are no more religion itself, than the exercises and evolutions of your parade were real warfare.
Shocked as we are by this brutal platform, there is something in it that appeals to the red blood and adventurous spirit in us; after all, we are not far removed from the savage, and the thought of a psalm-singing, tea-drinking, tamely good world is abhorrent to the marrow of us.
The seats were, until well into this century, almost universally hung on hinges, and could be turned up against the walls of the pew, thus enabling the standing congregation to lean for support against the sides of the pews during the psalm-singing and the long, long prayers.
Madam, says I, you may think your cousin looks like a psalm-singing weaver, in that bare felt, and with that rascally brown cloak; that band, which looks like a baby's clout, and those loose boots, which have a whole calf-skin in each of them, but let him wear on the one side of his head a castor, with a plume befitting his quality; give him a good Toledo by his side, with a broidered belt and an inlaid hilt, instead of the ton of iron contained in that basket-hilted black Andrew Ferrara; put a few smart words in his mouth and, blood and wounds! madam, says I "
Little discomforts which would cause an ordinary American or European soldier to use volumes of profanity were passed by without notice or comment by these psalm-singing Boers, and inconveniences of greater moment, like the disarrangement of the commissariat along the route, caused only slight remonstrances from them.
"for all we know Of what the blessed do above Is that they sing and that they love." And to even that remnant of music their few jumbled cacophonous melodies they clung with a devotion almost phenomenal. Nor should we underrate the cohesive power that psalm-singing proved in the early communities; it was one of the most potent influences in gathering and holding the colonists together in love.
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