They've totally demolished the bank on Main Street.

These superstitions and traditions were all odd and strange beliefs, which mingled the materialistic and the spiritual most incongruously; but they were not so degrading, and they were not so far from truth as the “enlightened” ideas respecting our origin, circulated in costly volumes during recent years, by authors whose Adam and Eve were frogs, formed from slime by the action of the sun, with a dash of electricity, and in which, from gratitude for their descent, their progeny for centuries, millenniums, or millionenniums wallowed.

The errands before he could start the project included getting material at the store and getting the tools he had lent his neighbors.

“Political itching—a reference, perhaps, to the duchess's notorious political and sexual intriguing, and carrying the implicit suggestion that her strumpetry led to her contraction of “the itch, or venereal disease.