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Moreover, those local subdivisions which, in the Northern colonies, were called towns, in Virginia were called parishes; and accordingly, in the latter, the usual local officers who manage the public business for each civil neighborhood were called, not selectmen or supervisors, as at the North, but vestrymen.
"He is one of the vestrymen here." "My soul!" still gazing after the Emperor of Wall Street; "Him passin' the plate! Well," with a grim smile, "whoever picked him out for the job has got judgment. If he can't make a body shell out, nobody can." He listened to the sermon, the text of which was from the Beatitudes, with outward solemnity, but with a twinkle in his eye.
We learn about such things as "Gatherings" at Hocktide, May-day, All Hallow-day, Christmas, and Whitsuntide, the men stopping the women on one day and demanding money, while on the next day the women retaliated, and always gained more for the parish fund than those of the opposite sex: Church Ales, the Holy Loaf, Paschal Money, Watching the Sepulchre, the duties of clerks and clergymen, and much else, besides the general principles of local self-government, which the vestrymen carried on until quite recent times.
On the other hand, Theodore taught Sunday School at Christ Church, but he was so muscular a Christian that the decorous vestrymen thought him an unwise guide in piety. For one day a boy came to class with a black eye which he had got in fighting a larger boy for pinching his sister.
He would then manage with great difficulty to provide the seven or eight hundred francs demanded of him with which the peasant bought himself a morsel of land. When pious persons and vestrymen denounced the fraud, begging the abbe to consult them in future before lending himself to such cupidity, he would say: "But suppose they had done something wrong to obtain their bit of land?
During this time, he was in familiar intercourse with the principal members of his church, and especially with the leading vestrymen who held out inducements to him beyond the fixed salary; but no allusion was made to the subject, and he had too much delicacy to introduce it. At last, matters approached a climax.
One of these vestrymen complained to the doorkeeper, and denounced the lecturer as an impostor "and," said the wealthy parishioner, "as for the panorama, it is the worst painted thing I ever saw." During the lecture Artemus was always as solemn as the grave. Sometimes he would seem to forget his audience, and stand for several seconds gazing intently at his panorama.
I talked about this with the vestrymen and the ladies of Good Society; they were deeply pained, but I noticed that they did nothing practical about it; and gradually, as I went on to investigate, I discovered the reason that their incomes came from real estate, traction, gas and other interests, which were contributing the main part of the campaign expenses of the corrupt Tammany machine, and of its equally corrupt rival.
Nor was there the slightest breach of politeness: they were as punctiliously polite when chance brought us into contact with them, as well-bred folk are to strangers whose further acquaintance they have no desire to cultivate. The vestrymen of St.
Rather they seemed to call from their cloudy towers, like some renegade muezzin: "Sleep is better than prayer; sleep on, O sons of the Puritans! Slumber still, O deacons and vestrymen! Let, oh let those feet that are swift to wickedness curl up beneath thee! those palms that are itching for the shekels of the ungodly lie clasped beneath thy pillow! Sleep is better than prayer."
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