the World," I pinned on the door of the Stopping Place the announcement: "Divine service will be held at Swan Creek, in the Stopping Place Parlor, a week from Sunday, immediately upon the conclusion of the baseball match.
"Arthur Wellington Moore." There was a strange incongruity in the two, and an unconscious challenge as well.
All next day, which was Saturday, and, indeed, during the following week, I stood guard over my notice, enjoying the excitement it produced and the comments it called forth.

It was the advance wave of the great ocean of civilization which many of them had been glad to leave behind--some could have wished forever.
To Robert Muir, one of the farmers newly arrived, the notice was a harbinger of good.

It stood for progress, markets and a higher price for land; albeit he wondered "hoo he wad be keepit up." But his hard-wrought, quick-spoken little wife at his elbow "hooted" his scruples and, thinking of her growing lads, welcomed with unmixed satisfaction the coming of "the meenister." Her satisfaction was shared by all the mothers and most of the fathers in the settlement; but by the others, and especially by that rollicking, roistering crew, the Company of the Noble Seven, the missionary's coming was viewed with varying degrees of animosity.

It meant a limitation of freedom in their wildly reckless living.

The "Permit" nights would now, to say the least, be subject to criticism; the Sunday wolf-hunts and horse-races, with their attendant delights, would now be pursued under the eye of the Church, and this would not add to the enjoyment of them.