CHAPTER XII.
THE HARDSHELL PREACHER.
"They's preachin' down to Bethel Meetin'-house to-day," said the Squire at breakfast.

Twenty years In the West could not cure Squire Hawkins of saying "to" for "at." "I rather guess as how the old man Bosaw will give pertickeler fits to our folks to-day." For Squire Hawkins, having been expelled from the "Hardshell" church of which Mr.Bosaw was pastor, for the grave offense of joining a temperance society, had become a member of the "Reformers," the very respectable people who now call themselves "Disciples," but whom the profane will persist in calling "Campbellites." They had a church in the village of Clifty, three miles away.
I know that explanations are always abominable to story readers, as they are to story writers, but as so many of my readers have never had the inestimable privilege of sitting under the gospel as it is ministered in enlightened neighborhoods like Flat Creek, I find myself under the necessity--need-cessity the Rev.Mr.Bosaw would call it--of rising to explain.

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.