How to fit in with the family life lived at the Morgan farmhouse was one of the puzzles of the new-comer. For the first time, Louise was in doubt how to pass her time, what to do with herself. Not that she had not enough to do. She was a young woman having infinite resources; she could have locked the door on the world downstairs, and, during her husband's absence in field or barn, have lived a happy life in her own world of reading, writing, sewing, planning. But the question was, would that be fulfilling the duties which the marriage covenant laid upon her? How, in that way, could she contribute to the general good of the family into which she had been incorporated, and which she had pledged herself before God to help to sustain? But, on the other hand, how should she set about contributing to the general good? Every avenue seemed closed.
After spending one day in comparative solitude, save the visits that her husband managed to pay, from time to time, to the front room upstairs, she, revolving the problem, lingered in the large kitchen the next morning, and, with pleasant face and kindly voice, said to Dorothy, "Let me help!" and essayed to assist in the work of clearing the family table—with what dire results!
Dorothy, thus addressed, seemed as affrighted as though an angel from heaven had suddenly descended before her and offered to wash the dishes; and she let slip, in her amazement, one end of the large platter, containing the remains of the ham, and a plentiful supply of ham gravy—which perverse stuff trickled and dripped, in zigzag lines, over the clean, coarse linen which covered the table. Dorothy's exclamation of dismay brought her mother quickly from the bedroom; and, then and there, she gave a short, sharp lecture on carelessness.
"What need had you to jump because you were spoken to?" she said, in severe sarcasm, to the blazing-cheeked Dorothy. "I saw you. One would think you had never seen anybody before, nor had a remark made to you. I would try to act a little more as though I had common sense if I were you. This makes the second clean table-cloth in a week! Now, go right away and wash the grease out, and scald yourself with boiling water to finish up the morning."
Then, to Louise: "She doesn't need your help; a girl who couldn't clear off a breakfast table alone, and wash up the dishes, would be a very shiftless sort of creature, in my opinion. Dorothy has done it alone ever since she was twelve years old. She isn't shiftless, if she does act like a dunce before strangers. I'm sure I don't know what has happened to her, to jump and blush in that way when she is spoken to; she never used to do it."
It was discouraging, but Louise, bent on "belonging" to this household, tried again.
"Well, mother, what can I do to help? Since I am one of the family I want to take my share of the duties. What shall be my work after breakfast? Come, now, give me a place in the home army, and let me look after my corner. If you don't, I shall go out to the barn and help father and Lewis!"
But Mrs. Morgan's strong, stern face did not relax; no smile softened the wrinkles or brightened the eyes.
"We have always got along without any help," she said—and her voice reminded Louise of the icicles hanging at that moment from the sloping roof above her window. "Dorothy and I managed to do pretty near all the work, even in summer time, and it would be queer if we couldn't now, when there is next to nothing to do. Your hands don't look as though you were used to work."
"Well, that depends," said Louise, looking down on the hands that were offending at this moment by their shapely whiteness and delicacy; "there are different kinds of work, you know. I have managed to live a pretty busy life. I don't doubt your and Dorothy's ability to do it all, but that isn't the point; I want to help; then we shall all get through the sooner, and have a chance for other kinds of work." She had nearly said "for enjoyment," but a glance at the face looking down on her changed the words.
Then they waited; the younger woman looking up at her mother-in-law with confident, resolute eyes, full of brightness, but also full of meaning; and the older face taking on a shade of perplexity, as if this were a phase of life which she had not expected, and was hardly prepared to meet.
"There's nothing in life, that I know of, that you could do," she said at last, in a slow, perplexed tone. "There's always enough things to be done; but Dorothy knows how, and I know how, and—"
"And I don't," interrupted Louise lightly. "Well, then, isn't it your bounden duty to teach me? You had to teach Dorothy, and I daresay she made many a blunder before she learned. I'll promise to be as apt as I can. Where shall we commence? Can't I go and dry those dishes for Dorothy?"
Mrs. Morgan shook her head promptly.
"She would break every one of 'em before you were through," she said grimly; "such a notion as she has taken of jumping, and choking, and spilling things! I don't know what she'll do next."
"Well, then, I'll tell you what I can do. Let me take care of John's room. Isn't that it just at the back of ours? I saw him coming from that door this morning. While you are at work down here, I can attend to that. May I?"
"Why, there's nothing to do to it," was Mrs. Morgan's prompt answer, "except to spread up the bed, and that takes Dorothy about three minutes. Besides, it is cold in there; you folks who are used to coddling over a fire would freeze to death. I never brought up my children to humour themselves in that way."
Louise, not wishing to enter into an argument concerning the advantages and disadvantages of warm dressing-rooms, resolved upon cutting this interview short.
"Very well, I shall spread up the bed then, if there is nothing else that I can do. Dorothy, remember that is my work after this. Don't you dare to take it away from me."
Lightly spoken, indeed, and yet with an undertone of decision in it that made Mrs. Morgan, senior, exclaim wrathfully, as the door closed after her daughter-in-law,—
"I do wish she would mind her own business! I don't want her poking around the house, peeking into places, under the name of 'helping!' As if we needed her help! We have got along without her for thirty years, and I guess we can do it now."
But Dorothy was still smarting under the sharpness of the rebuke administered to her in the presence of this elegant stranger, and did not in any way indicate that she heard her mother's comments, unless an extra bang of the large plate she was drying expressed her disapproval.
As for Louise, who will blame her that she drew a little troubled sigh as she ascended the steep staircase? And who will fail to see the connection between her thoughts and the action which followed? She went directly to an ebony box resting on her old-fashioned bureau, and drew from it a small velvet case, which, when opened, revealed the face of a middle-aged woman, with soft, silky hair, combed smooth, and wound in a knot underneath the becoming little breakfast cap, with soft lace lying in rich folds about a shapely throat, with soft eyes that looked out lovingly upon the gazer, with lips so tender and suggestive, that even from the picture they seemed ready to speak comforting words.
"Dear mother!" said Louise, and she pressed the tender lips again and again to hers. "'As one whom his mother comforteth.' Oh, I wonder if John could understand anything of the tenderness in that verse?" Then she held back the pictured face and gazed at it, and something in the earnest eyes and quiet expression recalled to her words of help and strength, and suggestions of opportunity; so that she closed the case, humming gently the old, strong-souled hymn, "A charge to keep I have," and went in search of broom, and duster, and sweeping-cap, and then penetrated to the depths of John's room; the development of Christian character in this young wife actually leading her to see a connection between that low-roofed back corner known as "John's room," and the call to duty which she had just sung—
"A charge to keep I have,A God to glorify."
What, through the medium of John's room! Yes, indeed. That seemed entirely possible to her. More than that, a glad smile and a look of eager desire shone in her face as she added the lines—
"A never-dying soul to saveAnd fit it for the sky."
What if—oh, what if the Lord of the vineyard had sent her to that isolated farmhouse to be the link in the chain of events which he designed to have end in the saving and fitting for glory of John Morgan's never-dying soul!
Possibly you would have thought it was a sudden descent into the prosaic, if you could have stepped with her into the low-roofed room. Can I describe to you its desolation, as it appeared to the eyes of the cultured lady? She stopped on the threshold, stopped her song, and gazed with a face of dismay! Bare-floored; the roof on the eastern side sloping down to within three feet of the floor; one western window, small-paned, curtainless; one wooden-seated chair, on which stood the inevitable candlestick, and the way in which the wick of the candle had been permitted to grow long and gutter down into the grease told a tale of dissipation of some sort indulged in the night before that would not fail to call out the stern disapproval of the watchful mother. There was not the slightest attempt at anything like appointments, unless an old-fashioned, twisted-legged stand that, despite its name, would not "stand" without being propped, having a ten-inch square glass hung over it, might be called an attempt. The bundle of very much twisted and tumbled bed-clothes in the corner, resting on the four-post bedstead, completed every suggestion of furniture which that long, low, dark room contained!
"Poor fellow!" said Louise, speaking her thoughts aloud, as the scene grew upon her. "Why shouldn't he 'give his father some troubled hours'? What else could they expect? How absolutely pitiful it is that this room and that downstairs kitchen are really the only places where the young man can spend a leisure hour! How has Lewis submitted to it?"
Yet, even as she spoke that last sentence, she felt the cold eyes, and remembered the stern mouth, of his mother, and realized that Lewis was powerless.
At the same moment I shall have to confess to you that the little new-comer into the home set her lips in a quiet, curious fashion that she had, which read to those well acquainted with her this sentence: "I shall not be powerless; see if I will." And, somehow, you couldn't help believing that she would not. She had a very curious time restoring order to that confused bed. It must be borne in mind that she had never before made up a chaff bed. The best quality of hair mattress had to do with all her experience of bed-making. This being the case, the initiated will not be surprised to hear that she tugged off the red and brown patchwork coverlet three times before she reduced that bed to the state of levelness which comported with her ideas. Then the pillows came in for their share of anxiety. They were so distressingly small! How did John manage with such inane, characterless affairs? She puffed them, and tossed them, and patted them, with all the skilled touches which a good bed-maker knows how to bestow, but to very little purpose. They were shrinking, shame-faced pillows still. The coarse factory sheet, not yet "bleached," was first made smooth, and then artistically rolled under the red and brown coverlet; and, while it looked direfully unlike what Louise would have desired, yet, when the whole was finished, even with such materials, the bed presented a very different appearance from what it did after undergoing Dorothy's "spreading up."
Then, when the sweeping was concluded, Louise stood and thought. What was to be done with that room? How much would she dare to do? She had determined to make no sort of change in her own room at present; she would not even change the position of the great old bedstead, though this was a sacrifice on her part only to be appreciated by those who are able, on their first entrance into a room, to see, by a sort of intuition, the exact spot where every article of furniture should be in order to secure the best effects, and to whom the ill arrangement is a positive pain. Louise had seen, even on her first entrance into her room, that the most awkward possible spot for the bedstead had been chosen; nevertheless she heroically left it there. But she looked with longing eyes on that twisted table in John's room. How she would have enjoyed selecting one of those strong, white, serviceable tidies, and overspreading the marred top with it, and placing there a book or two, and a perfume bottle, or some delicate knick-knack, to give the room a habitable air. For fully five minutes she stood shivering in the cold, trying to determine the important question. Then she resolutely shook her head, and said aloud, "No, it won't do; I must wait," and went downstairs with her dust-pan.
During her short absence the dishes had been whisked into their places, the kitchen made clean, and both mother and daughter were seated at their sewing. Mrs. Morgan eyed the trim figure in sweeping-cap and gloves, a broom and dust-pan in hand, with no approval in her glance.
"I should think you were a little too much dressed up for such work," she said, producing at last the thought which had been rankling for two days. This was Louise's opportunity.
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"Oh no," she said pleasantly. "I am dressed just right for ordinary work. Why, mother, my dress cost less than Dorothy's; hers is part woollen, and mine is nothing but cotton."
This remark brought Dorothy's eyes from her work; and fixed them in admiring wonder on the well-dressed lady before her. Being utterly unacquainted with materials and grades of quality, and judging of dress only by its effects, it was like a bewildering revelation that the dress which to her looked elegant, cost less than her own. There flashed just then into her heart the possibility that some day she too might have something pretty.
Louise did not wait for her revelation to be commented upon, but drew nearer to the workers. Mrs. Morgan was sewing rapidly on a dingy calico for herself.
"Oh, let me make the button-holes," said, or rather exclaimed, the new daughter, as though it were to be counted a privilege. "I can make beautiful ones, and I always made mother's and Estelle's."
Now, it so happened that Mrs. Morgan, with all her deftness with the needle, and she had considerable, was not skilled in that difficult branch of needle-work, the making of button-holes. Moreover, though she considered it an element of weakness, and would by no means have acknowledged it, she hated the work with an absolute hatred, born of a feeling, strong in such natures as hers, of aversion toward anything which they cannot do as well, if not better, than others. The thought of securing well-made button-holes, over which she had not to struggle, came with a sense of rest to her soul, and she answered, more kindly than Louise had heard her speak before,—
"Oh, I don't want you to bother with my button-holes."
"I shall not," said Louise brightly. "Button-holes never bother me; I like to work them as well as some people like to do embroidery."
Then she went to the sink in the kitchen, and washed her hands in the bright tin basin, and dried them on the coarse, clean family towel. Presently she came, thimble and needle-case in hand, and established herself on one of the yellow wooden chairs, to make button-holes in the dingy calico; and, with the delicate stitches in those button-boles, she worked an entrance-way into her mother-in-law's heart.
"AT what hour do you have to start for church?"
This was the question which Louise asked of her husband on Saturday evening, as she moved about their room making preparations for the next morning's toilet.
"Well," he said, "it is three miles, you know. We make an effort to get started by about half-past nine, though sometimes we are late. It makes hurrying work on Sunday morning, Louise. I don't know how you will like that."
"I shouldn't think there would be room in one carriage for all the family. Is there?"
"Room for all who go," Lewis said gravely.
"All who go! why, they all go to church, don't they?"
"Why, no; in fact, they never all go at one time; they cannot leave the house, you know."
Louise's bewildered look proved that she did not know.
"Why not?" she asked, with wonderment in tone and eyes. "What will happen to the house?"
Despite a desire not to do so, her husband was obliged to laugh.
"Well," he said hesitatingly, "you know they never leave a farmhouse alone and go to church."
"I didn't know it, I am sure. Why don't they?"
"I declare I don't know," and he laughed again. "Possibly it is a notion; there are ugly-looking fellows prowling around sometimes, and—well, it's the custom, anyhow."
"Don't they ever close the house and all go away?"
Then was Lewis Morgan nonplussed. Distinct memories rose before his eyes of Good Fridays and Christmas days, and gala days of several sorts, when the house had been closed and darkened, and left to itself from early morning late into the afternoon. How was he to explain why a thing that was feasible for holidays became impracticable on the Sabbath?
"I'm not sure but that is one of the things that 'no f-f-fellow can f-f-find out,'" he said, with a burst of laughter. "Do you know 'Lord Dundreary'?" Then: "Seriously, Louise, our family has fallen into the custom that obtains of not closing a farmhouse save on special occasions. I suspect the custom sometimes grows out of indifference for church. You remember that none of the family have a real love for the service. It is a source of sorrow to me, as you may suppose. I hope for better things."
Then the talk drifted away into other channels; but in Louise's heart there lingered a minor tone of music over the thought that the next day would be the Sabbath. Shut away, for the first time in her life, from the prayer-meeting, from the hour of family worship, from constant and pleasant interchange of thought on religious themes, she felt a hunger for it all such as she had never realized before, and closed her eyes that night with this refrain in her heart, "To-morrow I shall go to church."
The first conscious sound the next morning was the dripping of the rain-drops from the eaves.
"Oh dear!" Lewis said, dismay in his voice. "We are going to have a rainy day!"
A careful, critical look at the prospect from the eastern window confirmed this opinion, and he repeated it with a gloomy face, adding,—
"I don't know when the weather has succeeded in disappointing me so much before."
"Never mind," Louise said cheerily. "It will not make much difference. I don't mind the rain. I have a rainy day suit, that mamma used to call my coat of mail. It is impervious to all sorts of weather; and, with your rubber coat, and a good-sized umbrella, we shall do almost as well as though the sun shone."
But her husband's face did not brighten.
"It is not personal inconvenience that I fear for you," he said gravely, "but disappointment. The truth is, Louise, I am afraid we can't go to church. This looks like a persistent storm, and my father has such a love for his horses, and such a dread of their exposure to these winter storms, that he never thinks of getting them out in the rain unless it is absolutely necessary; and you know he doesn't consider church-going an absolutely necessary thing. Could you bear to be disappointed, and stay at home with me all day?"
"Why, yes," said Louise slowly, trying to smile over those two words, "with me." "That is, if it is right. But, Lewis, it seems so strange a thing to do, to stay at home from church all day on account of a little rain that would hardly keep us from a shopping excursion."
"I know, looking at it from your standpoint it must seem very strange; but all the education of my home has been so different that I do not suppose it even seems as strange to me as to you. Still I by no means approve; and, as soon as I can make arrangements for a horse of my own, we will not be tried in this way. Indeed, Louise, I can manage it now. Of course, if I insist on it, my father will yield the point, but he will offer very serious objection. What do you think? Would it be right to press the question against his will?"
"Certainly not," his wife said hastily. "At least," she added, with a bright smile, "I don't suppose the command to obey one's parents is exactly annulled by the marriage service. Anyhow, the 'honour thy father and thy mother' never is."
And she put aside her church toilet, and made her preparations to do that which was to her an unprecedented thing—stay at home from church in full health and strength.
The question once settled that, under the circumstances, it was the proper thing to do, it was by no means a disagreeable way of spending Sabbath morning. Her husband had been so constantly occupied since their home-coming in carrying out his father's plans for improvements on the farm, that Louise had seen but little of him; and when, after breakfast, they returned to their own room, and he, in dressing-gown and slippers, replenished the crackling wood fire, and opened the entire front of the old-fashioned stove, letting the glow from it brighten the room, Louise admitted that the prospect was most inviting.
She drew in her own little rocker, which had travelled with her from her room at home, and settled beside him, book in hand, for a delightful two hours of social communion, such as they had not enjoyed for weeks before.
The reading and the talking that went on in that room, on that rainy Sabbath morning, were looked back to afterward as pleasant hours to be remembered. Occasionally the fact that it was Sunday, and she not at church, and a picture of the dear church at home, and the dear faces in the family pew, and the seat left vacant in the Sunday school room, would shadow Louise's face for an instant; but it brightened again. She had chosen her lot, guided, as she believed, by the hand of her Lord. It was not for a face realizing this to be in shadow.
It was not until the Sunday dinner had been eaten, and they were back again, those two, in the brightness of their enjoyed solitude, that the grave, preoccupied look on Louise's face told that her thoughts were busy with something outside of their surroundings—something that troubled her.
"Lewis, what shall we do this afternoon?" she asked him, interrupting a sentence in which he was declaring that a rainy Sunday was, after all, a blessing.
"Do!" he repeated. "Why, we will have a delightful Sunday afternoon talk, and a little reading, and a good deal of—well, I don't know just what name to give it; heart-rest, perhaps, would be a good one. Aren't you enjoying the day, dear?"
She turned toward him a smiling face.
"Yes, with a thoroughly selfish enjoyment, I am afraid. I was thinking of the family downstairs; what can we do to help them, Lewis?"
"Oh!" said her husband, and his face clouded; he seemed to have no other suggestion to offer.
"They did not look as though they were enjoying the day. I think it must be dreary for Dorothy and John. I wish we could contribute something to make the time seem less lonely to them. Suppose we go down, Lewis, and try what we can do."
Her husband looked as though that was the thing, of all others, which he had the least desire to do.
"My dear Louise," he began slowly, then stopped, and, finding that she waited, began again. "The trouble is, wife, I don't know how we can help any of them. They are not good at talking, and the sort of talk in which John and Dorothy indulge wouldn't strike you as being suited to the Sabbath day; in fact, I don't believe you would join in it. They are used to being at home on the Sabbath; we are always home from church by this time, and the afternoon is the same to them it always is. I don't believe we can do anything, dear."
Mrs. Morgan did not look in the least convinced.
"The afternoon ought not to be the same to them it always has been, should it, Lewis? We have come home, a new element in the family. We ought, surely, to have some influence. Can't we find something to say that will do for the Sabbath? What have you talked about with the family before I came? How did you spend Sunday afternoons?"
"Up here, in my room, when it wasn't too cold; and sometimes, when it was, I went to bed, and did my reading and thinking there. I rarely go downstairs on Sunday until milking time. You see, Louise, I really don't know my own family very well. The early age at which I left home, being only back for a few weeks at a time during vacations; then my exile, with Uncle John, to Australia—all this has contributed to making me a sort of stranger among them. I doubt whether John and Dorothy feel much better acquainted with me than they do with you. They were both little things when I went away; and, during this last year, I hardly know what is the matter. Perhaps I haven't gone about it in the right way, but I haven't seemed to make any advances in their direction."
"To be very frank with you, Louise, John is always sullen toward me; and Dorothy acts as though she were half afraid of me, and her foolish jumpings and blushings seem so out of place, when one remembers that she is my own sister, that, I will confess to you, I sometimes feel utterly out of patience with her. As for my mother and father, while I honour them as true, unselfish, faithful parents, there are many subjects upon which we do not think alike; and I am often at a loss to know how to get along without hurting their feelings. The result is, that I shirk the social a good deal, and devote myself to myself, or did. Now that I have you to devote myself to, I am willing to be as social as you please."
The sentence, begun in seriousness, he had purposely allowed to assume a lighter tone; but Louise held with sweet gravity to her former topic.
"Even Christ pleased not himself," she quoted gently. Then added, "You may imagine how pleasant it is to me to sit here with you for a whole quiet day. Nevertheless, Lewis, let us go downstairs to the family, and see if we cannot, as a family, honour the day together."
She had risen as she spoke, and drawn her little rocker away from the stove, preparatory to leaving the room. Very slowly her husband followed her example, reluctance on every line of his face.
"I will go down with you, if you say so; but, honestly, I never dreaded to do anything more in my life! I can imagine that it seems a very strange thing to you, but I really and truly don't in the least know what to say when we got down there—I mean, that will be in keeping with our ideas of the Sabbath, and will help anybody."
"Neither do I," said Louise quietly. "Since we both feel our unfitness, let us kneel down before we go, and ask for the Spirit's guidance. Don't you know he promises: 'Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee saying, This is the way, walk ye in it'? I cannot help thinking that he points us down to that family room; why should not we ask him to fill our mouths?"
Without another word, and with a strange sense of solemnity about him, the young husband turned and dropped upon his knees beside his wife.
A few minutes thereafter they of the kitchen were startled by the unexpected entrance of the young couple into their midst. Almost any movement would have startled the quiet that reigned therein.
The kitchen, on a dull day, with its scarcity of windows, was a dark and dingy spot, the clean and shining stove being the only speck of brightness. The family group was complete; yet Louise, as she glanced around her, taking in their occupations, or want of occupations, could not forbear feeling the sense of dulness which their positions suggested. Farmer Morgan, with his steel-bowed spectacles mounted on his forehead, winked and blinked over the columns of the weekly paper. Mrs. Morgan sat bolt upright in her favourite straight-backed chair, and held in her hands an old-fashioned family Bible, in which Nellie had dutifully been spelling out the words until her restlessness had gotten the better of her mother's patience, and she had been sent to the straight-backed chair in the corner, to sit "until she could learn to stand still, and not twist around on one foot, and hop up and down when she was reading!" How long will poor Nellie have to "sit" before she learns that lesson?
Dorothy, without the hopping, was not one whit less restless, and lounged from one chair to another in an exasperatingly aimless way, calling forth from her mother, several times, a sharp—
"Dorothy, why can't you sit still when you get a chance? If you worked as hard as I do all the week, you would be glad enough of a day of rest." But poor Dorothy was not glad; she hated the stillness and inaction of the Sabbath; she breathed a sigh of relief when the solemn-voiced clock clanged out another hour, and looked forward with a sort of satisfaction even to the bustle of the coming wash-day morning. John was there, as silent and immovable as a statue, sitting in his favourite corner, behind the stove; in his favourite attitude, boots raised high to the stove-hearth; slouched hat on, drawn partly over his eyes; hands in his pockets, and a deeper shade of sullenness on his face. So it seemed to Louise. "Poor fellow!" she said, in compassionate thought. "It is a surprise to me that he doesn't do something awfully wicked. He will do it, too; I can see it in his face; unless—"
But she didn't finish her thought, even to herself. These various persons glanced up on the entrance of the two, and looked their surprise. Then Farmer Morgan, seeing that they proposed to take seats, moved his chair a little and motioned Lewis nearer the stove, with the words—
"A nasty day; fire feels good."
"Yet it hasn't rained much," Lewis said, watching Louise, and finding that she went over to the unoccupied chair nearest Nellie, he took the proffered seat.
"Rained enough to make mean going for to-morrow; and we've got to go to town in the morning, rain or shine. I never did see the beat of this winter for rain and mud; I don't believe it will freeze up before Christmas."
"You can't get started very early for town," remarked Mrs. Morgan. "There was so much to do yesterday that I didn't get around to fixing the butter, and it will take quite a little spell in the morning; and Dorothy didn't count over the eggs, and pack 'em, either. Dorothy's fingers were all thumbs, by the way she worked yesterday; we didn't get near as much done as common."
"She and John were about a match, I guess," Farmer Morgan said, glancing at the sullen-browed young man behind the stove. "Yesterday was his unlucky day. About everything you touched broke, didn't it, John?"
"That's nothing new."
John growled out this contribution to the conversation between lips that seemed firmly closed. Lewis glanced toward his wife. How would she think they were getting on? What would she think of butter, and eggs, and accidents as topics for Sabbath conversation?
But Louise had put an arm around little Nellie, and was holding a whispered conversation with her, and at this moment broke into the talk.
"Mother, may this little maiden come and sit on my lap, if she will be very good and quiet? My arms ache for the little girlie who used to climb into them at about this hour on Sunday."
"NELLIE is too big to sit on people's laps," her mother said; "but she can get up, if she wants to, and can keep from squirming about like a wild animal, instead of acting like a well-behaved little girl."
"Too big" though she was considered, Nellie, poor baby, gladly availed herself of the permission, and curled in a happy little heap in her new sister's arms; when commenced a low-toned conversation. Lewis watched her and struggled with his brain, striving to think of some way of helping.
"Have you got acquainted with Mr. Butler, father?"
Now Mr. Butler was the new minister; and Louise, who had heard his name mentioned, was interested in the answer. Farmer Morgan laid down his newspaper, crossed one leg over the other, tilted his chair back a trifle, and was ready to talk.
"Acquainted with him? No, I can't say that I am; he knows my name, and I know his; and he says, 'How do you do?' to me when he meets me on the street, if he isn't in too brown a study to notice me at all. I reckon that as about as near as I shall get to an acquaintance. I ain't used to any great attention from ministers, you know."
"I thought possibly he had called during my absence."
"No, he hasn't. When it comes to making a friendly call, we live a good way out, and the road is bad, and the weather is bad, and it is tremendously inconvenient."
"We always live a good way out of town, except when there is to be a fair or festival, or doings of some kind, when they want cream, and butter, and eggs, and chickens; then we are as handy to get at as anybody in the congregation." This from his mother.
Lewis could not avoid a slight laugh; the social qualities of the little church in the village, or at least its degree of social intercourse with its country neighbours, was so clearly stated by that last sentence.
"Oh, well," he said, "it is a good way out for those who have no horses to depend on, and many of the church people are in that condition. As for Mr. Butler, he has been here but a short time; of course he hasn't gotten around the parish yet."
"No," said his father significantly. "It takes a dreadful long time to get around a small field, especially when there's no special motive for going. But we don't care; a body would think, to hear us talk, that we were dreadful anxious for a call. I don't know what he would call for; 'pears to me it would be a waste of time."
"You like his preaching, don't you, father?"
The farmer tore little strips from the edge of his paper, and rolled them thoughtfully between his thumb and finger for a little before he answered.
"Why, his preaching is all well enough, I suppose; I never heard any preaching that wouldn't do pretty well, considering; it's the practising that I find fault with. I can't find anybody that seems to be doing what the preachers advise. What is the use in preaching all the time, if nobody goes and does it?"
This was Farmer Morgan's favourite topic, as indeed it seems to be a favourite with a great many people—the inconsistencies of the Christian world. A fruitful topic, certainly; and it is bitterly to be regretted that there is cause for such unending sarcasm on that subject. Lewis had heard the same sentiment often before, and being met—as, unfortunately, so many of us are—by an instant realization of his own inconsistencies, his mouth had been stopped at once. To-day he rallied his waning courage, and resolved upon a point-blank question.
"Well, father, why don't you, who understand so well how a Christian ought to live, set us an example, and perhaps we will succeed better when we try to copy you?"
This question astounded Farmer Morgan. Coming from a minister, he would have considered it pretty sharp; have laughed at it good-naturedly, and turned it aside. But from his own son, and spoken in such a tone of gravity and earnestness as left no room for trifling, it startled him. Lewis had never spoken to him in that direct fashion before. In truth, Lewis had been, during all his Christian life at home, comforting his heart and excusing his conscience with the belief that, in order not to prejudice his father against religion, he would do well to make no personal appeals of any sort. To-day, in the light of the brief conversation which he had held with his wife, and, more than that, in the light of the brief prayer in which they had asked the guidance of the Holy Spirit, he began to conclude that he had been a coward.
"Well," his father said, after a moment of astonished silence, "that is a fair question, maybe; but then, after all, it is easily answered. There's folks enough trying at it, and making failures, without me to swell their number. Till I see somebody who is succeeding a little better than any one I know, I haven't got the courage to begin."
"Leaving us an example, that ye should fellow His steps," quoted Lewis Morgan solemnly. "After all, father, the true pattern is certainly perfect; why not follow that? Who ever asks the school-boy to imitate the scrawl of some fellow-pupil, so long as the perfect copy is just before his eyes, at the top of the page?"
His father regarded him meditatively. Was he touched at last—impressed by the thought of the wonderful life waiting for him to follow? Lewis Morgan's breath came quickly, and he waited in trembling eagerness for the reply. It was the first time that he had attempted anything like a personal conversation on this subject with his father.
Slowly, and with apparent great seriousness, the answer came at last:—
"It is almost a pity that your health didn't hold out; I ain't sure, after all, but you would have made as good a minister as the rest of them. Sometimes I'm a trifle afraid that you have got a little too much learning to make a downright good farmer."
The quick bounds of hope that the son's blood was making receded in dull, heavy throbs, and he counted his first attempt a failure. He looked over to Louise. Was not she ready to give up this hopeless attempt at spiritualizing the tone of the conversation downstairs? He thought he would give almost anything to hide his sore heart just then in the quiet of their own room, with the sympathy of her presence to soothe him.
But Louise was telling Nellie a story; and as he listened and watched her, it became evident to him that both Dorothy and John were listening. Dorothy had ceased her restless fidgetings, and settled into absolute quiet, her arm resting on the broad, low window-seat, and her eyes fixed on Louise. John had drawn his hat lower, so that his eyes were hidden entirely; but something in the setting of his lips told Lewis that he heard. Very quietly Louise's voice told the story; very simply chosen were the words.
"Yes, there He was in the wilderness, for forty days, without anything to eat, and nowhere to rest, and all the time Satan tempting him to do what was wrong. 'Come,' he said to him; 'if you are the Son of God, why do you stay here hungry? What good will that do anybody? Why don't you make bread out of these stones? You can do it—you could make a stone into a loaf of bread in an instant; why don't you?"
"And could he?" Nellie asked, her eyes large and wondering.
"Oh yes indeed. Why not? Do you suppose it would be any harder to turn a stone into bread than it would be to make a strawberry, or a potato, or an apple?"
"Strawberries and apples and potatoes grow," said this advanced little sceptic.
"Yes; but what makes them grow? And why does a strawberry plant always give us strawberries, and never plums or grapes? It never makes a mistake. Somebody very wise is taking care of the little plant. It is this same person whom Satan was trying to coax to make bread out of stones."
"Well, why didn't he do it? I don't think it would have been naughty."
"I'll tell you. It is very hard to be hungry; it was a great temptation; but Jesus had promised his Father that he would come here and bear everything that any man could have to—that he would just be a man. Now a man couldn't make bread out of stones, you know, so Jesus wouldn't be keeping his promise if he did it; and then, another thing, if he had used his great power and gotten himself out of this trouble, all the poor hungry boys and girls, who are tempted to steal, would have said: 'Oh yes, Jesus don't know anything about how it feels to be hungry; he could turn stones into bread. If we could do that we wouldn't steal either.' Don't you see?"
"Yes," said Nellie, "I see. Go on, please; he didn't make any bread, did he?"
"Not at that time; he told Satan it was more important that he should show his trust in God than to show his power by making stones into bread. Then Satan coaxed him to throw himself down from a great high steeple, so that the people below would see him, and see that he wasn't hurt at all. He reminded him of a promise that God made about the angels taking care of him."
"I wish he had done that!" Nellie said, with shining eyes. "Then the people would all have believed that he was God."
"No, they wouldn't; for afterward he did just as wonderful things as that. He cured deaf people and blind people, and raised dead people to life, and they didn't believe in him; instead, some of them were angry with him about these very things. He told Satan that to put himself in danger, when there was nothing to be gained by it, was just tempting God. Dear me! How many boys and girls do that. Then Satan told him that he would give up the whole world to him if he would just fall down and worship him. I suppose Jesus thought then all about the weary way that he would have to travel—all the things he would have to bear."
"Did the world belong to Satan?" Nellie asked; at which question John was betrayed into a laugh.
"Well, yes, in a sense it did. Don't you see how much power Satan has over people in this world? They seem to like to work for him. Some of them are doing all they can to please him, and he is always at work coaxing them to give themselves entirely to him, promising them such great things if they only will. I suppose if he had kept that promise to Jesus, and given up leading the world in the wrong road, it would have been much easier for Jesus."
"But Jesus didn't do it."
"No, indeed. Jesus never would do anything wrong to save himself from trouble or sorrow. He said, 'Get thee hence.' What a pity that little boys and girls don't refuse, in that way, to listen to Satan, when he coaxes them and offers them rewards! Think of believing Satan! Why, the first we ever hear of him he was telling a lie to Eve in that garden, you know; and he has gone on cheating people ever since."
"He never cheated me," said Nellie positively.
"Didn't he? Are you sure? Did he never make you think that it would be so nice to do something that you knew mother wouldn't like? Hasn't he made you believe that you could have a really happy time if you could only do as you wanted to? And have you never tried it, and found out what an untrue thing it was?"
"Yes," said Nellie, drooping her head. "One time I ran away from school and went to the woods—I thought it would be splendid—and I got my feet wet, and was sick, and it wasn't nice a single bit."
"Of course not; and that is just the way Satan keeps treating people. Shouldn't you think, after he had deceived them a great many times, as they grew older they would decide that he was only trying to ruin them, and would have nothing more to do with him?"
"Yes," said Nellie, nodding her wise little head, "I should. But, then, maybe they can't get away from him."
"Oh yes, they can; don't you see how Jesus got away from him? And what do you think he suffered those temptations for, and then had the story written down for us? Just that we might see that he knew all about temptations and about Satan, and was stronger than he, and was able to help all tempted people. He says he will not let people be tempted more than they can bear, but will show them how to escape."
"Then why doesn't he?"
"He does, dear, every single time; he has never failed anybody yet, and it is hundreds and hundreds of years since he made that promise."
"But then I should think that everybody would be good, and never do wrong."
"Ah, but you see, little Nellie, the trouble is, people won't let him help them. I mean he takes care of all who trust in him to do so. But if you think you are strong enough to take care of yourself, and won't stay by him, nor obey his directions, nor ask his help, how can you expect to be kept out of trouble? When I was a little bit of a girlie I went to walk with my papa. He said: 'Now, Louise, if you will keep right in this path I will see that nothing hurts you.' We were going through the woods. For a little while I kept beside him, taking hold of his hand. Then I said: 'O papa, I'm not afraid; nothing will hurt me.' And away I ran into the thickest trees, and I got lost, and was in the woods nearly all night! Do you think that was my papa's fault?"
"No," said Nellie gravely. "But—I wish there wasn't any Satan. Does he ever bother you?"
Louise's head dropped lower; the talk was becoming very personal.
"Not often now," she said, speaking low. "He comes to me and whispers thoughts that I don't like, and I say—"
"Oh!" said Nellie, loud-voiced and eager, "I know—you say, 'Get thee behind me, Satan.'"
"No," said Louise firmly, "not that. I heard a lady say once that she was as much afraid of having Satan behind her as she was of having him anywhere else. So am I. Instead, I ask Jesus to send him away. I just say, 'Jesus keep me;' and at the name of Jesus, Satan goes away. He knows he cannot coax Jesus to do any wrong. But, oh dear! How hard he fights for those people who will not have Jesus to help them. He keeps whispering plans in their ears, and coaxing them, they thinking all the time that the plans are their own, and they follow them, expecting to have good times, and never having them; and all the while Satan laughs over their folly. Isn't it strange they will not take the help that Jesus offers?"
"Yes," said Nellie, slowly and gravely, with intense earnestness in voice and manner. "I mean to."
Louise drew her closer, rested her head against the golden one, and began to sing in low, sweet notes:—
"Take the name of Jesus everAs a shield for every snare;When temptations round you gather,Breathe that holy name in prayer."
All conversation, or attempts at conversation, had ceased in the room long before the singing. Some spell about the old, simply-told story of temptation and struggle and victory had seemed to hold all the group as listeners. John's face, as much of it as could be seen under his hat and shading hand, worked strangely. Was the blessed Holy Spirit, whose presence and aid had been invoked, using the story told the child to flash before this young man a revelation of the name of the leader he had been so faithfully following, so steadily serving, all the years of his young life? Did he begin to have a dim realization of the fact that his unsatisfying plans, his shattered hopes, were but the mockery of his false-hearted guide? Whatever he thought he kept it to himself, and rose abruptly in the midst of the singing and went out.
"Come," said Farmer Morgan, breaking the hush following the last line, "it is milking time, and time for a bit of supper, too, I guess. The afternoon has been uncommon short."
He tried to speak as usual, but his voice was a trifle husky. He could argue, but the story told his child had somehow subdued him. Who shall say that the Spirit did not knock loudly, that Sabbath afternoon, at the door of each heart in that room? Who shall say that he did not use Louise Morgan's simple efforts to honour the day in stirring the rust that had gathered about the hinges of those long-bolted doors?
THE little, old-fashioned square "stand" was drawn up in front of the stove, which last was opened to let a glow of brightness reach across the room, and beside it were Lewis and Louise Morgan, seated for an evening of good cheer. She had a bit of needle-work, in which she was taking careful stitches; and her husband held in his hand, open to a previously set mark, a handsomely bound copy of Shakespeare. He was one of those rare persons—a good reader of Shakespeare; and, in the old days at home, Louise had delighted to sit, work in hand, and listen to the music of his voice in the rendering.
He had not commenced the regular reading, but was dipping into bits here and there, while he waited for her to "settle," as he called the bringing of her small work-basket, and the searching out her work. Now, although she was "settled," and looking apparently thoughtful enough for the saddest scenes from the great writer, he still continued his glancings from page to page, breaking out presently with—
"Louise, do you remember this?"
"'I never did repent for doing good,Nor shall not now; for in companionsThat do converse and waste the time together,Whose souls do bear an equal yoke of love,There must be needs a like proportionOf lineaments, of manners, and of spirit.'"
"Do you remember what a suggestive shrug of her shoulders Estelle gave over the line—"
"'That do converse and waste the time together'?"
"I suspect she thought it fitted us precisely."
"Yes," Louise said, smiling in a most preoccupied way. That her thoughts were not all on Shakespeare, nor even on that fairer object, Estelle, she presently evinced by a question.
"Lewis, how far did Dorothy get in her studies?"
"Dorothy?" repeated her husband, looking up in surprise, and with difficulty coming back from Shakespeare; "I don't know, I am sure. As far, I remember hearing, as the teachers in our district school could take her. That is not saying much, to be sure; though, by the way, I hear they have an exceptionally good one this winter. Poor Dorothy didn't have half a chance; I tried to manage it, but I couldn't. Hear this, Louise,—"
"'How he glistens through my rust!And how his piety does my deeds make the blacker!'"
"Isn't that a simile for you?"
"Very," said Louise; and her husband glanced at her curiously. What was she thinking of, and how did that brief "very" fit in with Leontes' wonderful simile?
"Well," he said, "are your thimbles and pins and things all ready, wife? Shall I commence?"
"Not just yet, dear; I want to talk. What do you think about it; was she disappointed at not having better opportunities?"
"Who? Oh, Dorothy! I thought you were talking about Hermione; she fainted, you know. Yes, Dorothy was disappointed. She wanted to go to the academy in town, and she ought to have had the opportunity, but we couldn't bring it to pass. I was at home but a few weeks, or I might have accomplished more. What is the trouble, Louise dear? How does it happen that you find poor Dorothy more interesting than Shakespeare to-night?"
"Well," said Louise, laughing, "it is true; I cannot get away from her; her life seems so forlorn, somehow. I can't help being sorry for her. She is losing her girlhood almost before it is time for it to bloom. I have been wondering and wondering all day what there was that we could do for her; and I find the real life being worked out before our eyes so engrossing, that it is hard to come back to the dead lives of Shakespeare."
Her husband closed the book, putting his finger between the leaves to mark the place.
"I have studied that problem somewhat, Louise," he said earnestly, "in the days gone by. I didn't succeed in making much of it. It is true, as you say, that she is slipping away from girlhood, almost without knowing that she has been a girl. Sometimes I think that she will have only two experiences of life—childhood and old womanhood. Mother cannot realize that she is yet any more than a child, to be governed, and to obey; and one of these mornings it will be discovered that she is no longer a child, but has passed middle life. Her future looks somewhat dreary to me, I confess."
"We must not let it grow dreary," Louise said, with a determined tone, and a positive setting of her small foot—a curious habit that she had when very much in earnest. "What sense is there in it? She is young, and in good health, and has a sound brain; why should she not make her life what it ought to be? Why shouldn't we help her in a hundred ways?"
"Yes; but come down to actual, practical truth. What is there that she can do for herself, or that we can do for her? You see, Louise, our family is peculiar; there is no use in shutting one's eyes to that fact. It is not because father is a farmer that we find ourselves situated just as we are; other farmers have very different experiences. We are surrounded on all sides with men who get their living by cultivating the fields, whose sons and daughters are in college, or seminary, and in society, and who, in every way, take as good a position, and have as many advantages, as town-bred people—at the expense, it is true, of some inconvenience and special labour. Of course, it is also true that some of the sons and daughters do not choose to accept all the advantages for cultivation; and equally, of course, there are some who are unable to furnish the means for what they would like their children to enjoy; but no greater proportion of that class in the country than in town, I think. My father does not belong to any of these classes; he is, as I said, peculiar."
At this point both husband and wife stopped to laugh over the associations connected with that word "peculiar;" it bringing to the minds of both reminders of Gough and Dickens, as well as many more common characters which those two geniuses have caricatured.
"It is true, nevertheless," Lewis said, the laugh over. "Let me see if I can explain. In the first place, both father and mother had, in their youth, lives of grinding toil and poverty. Both were shrewd, clear-headed people, with, I think, much more than the average share of brains. The result is that, despite drawbacks and privations, they made their way, acquiring, not thorough educations, it is true, but a very fair degree of knowledge on all practical subjects. The amount of information which my mother, for instance, possesses about matters concerning which she would be supposed to know nothing would surprise you. Perhaps the result of all this is natural; anyhow, it is evident. They believe that the rubbing process is decidedly the best way to secure education or anything else needed in this world. If one makes his way in spite of obstacles, they believe it is because the grit is in him, and must find its end."
"Had Dorothy, for instance, pushed her determination to attend school in town, and get a thorough education; pushed it persistently—what you would call doggedly—against argument and opposition, and everything but absolute command—she would have won the prize, and both father and mother would have, in a certain sense, respected her more than they do now. But Dorothy was not of that mould. She wanted to go on with her studies. Had everything been smooth before her, she would, doubtless, have gone on, and made a fair scholar; but to stem a current, with so much against her, required more effort of a certain kind than she knew how to make."
"I conclude," said his wife, smiling brightly on him, "that you were one of those who can push persistently."
He answered her smile, partly with a laugh, and partly with a shrug of his handsome shoulders.
"I did push—most vehemently some of the time; worked my way part of the time besides, as you know; but in the end I gained. Both father and mother have a degree of pride in my persistence; it reminds them of their own rugged natures."
"I wonder that Dorothy, crossed in her natural ambitions, did not run into the extremes, on the question of dress and society, and, well—and aimless going generally, without regard to quality or consequence. That is the rock on which so many girls shipwreck."
"I think she would have done just that thing had she been given opportunity. I think it is what both my father and mother were afraid of. It has made them draw the reins of family government very tightly. They simply commanded that singing-schools, and country school debating societies, and social gatherings, should be ignored. We were all under that command; so that the consequence is, we are almost as isolated from our neighbours as though we had none. My mother did not feel the need of society. She could not understand why any one should feel that need; consequently, she has no society. There are good and pleasant people around us, people whom it would be a pleasure to you to meet; but they never come near us, because we have, as a family, given them to understand that we have nothing to do with common humanity."
"What a strange idea! Do you know, I have wondered why it was that your neighbours didn't call on me? I thought it must be that they had a preconceived dislike for me, somehow."
"They have a preconceived belief that you will not care to see them. You would be amused to see how this withdrawal from all friendships has been translated. If father were a poor man, having a struggle to get along, it would be set down as a dislike to mingling with those who were better off in this world's goods than ourselves; but with his farm stretching before their eyes in so many smiling acres, and with his barns the finest and best stocked in the neighbourhood, we are looked upon as a family too aristocratic to mingle with country people; which is simply funny, when you take into consideration the fact that we have never been other than country people ourselves, and that we live much more plainly than any of our neighbours. But you can readily see the effect on Dorothy; she has, in a degree, dropped out of life. The occasional going to church on a pleasant Sunday, and going to market with mother when both can, on rare occasions, be spared from home, being her two excitements. She has hardly a speaking acquaintance with the neighbours about us, and no associates whatever."
"Poor girl!" said Louise, and there was more than compassion in her voice; there was a curious undertone of determination, which made her husband smile, and wonder what this little woman, in whose capabilities he thoroughly believed, would do.
"Haven't I established the validity of our claim to being 'peculiar'?" he asked her.
"I should think you had! What has been the effect of the 'peculiarities' on John?"
Her husband's face instantly sobered, and there was a note of pain in his voice.
"John has broken loose from the restraints in a degree—in a painful degree. He has made his own associates; and they are of a kind that he wouldn't care to bring home, if he had an opportunity. He is away very frequently of evenings, it is difficult to tell where; but the daily decrease of anything like manliness attests the unfortunate result. I am more than suspicious that he is learning to drink something stronger than cider; and I am sure that he occasionally, at least, smokes—two vices that are my father's horror. He looks on with apparently mingled feelings of anger and dismay. His pet theories of family government have failed. He honestly desired to shield his children from evil influences; he is comparatively satisfied with the result both in Dorothy's case and mine. He doesn't know what to think of John. He has spells of great harshness and severity connected with him, thwarting everything that he undertakes in what must seem to John an utterly unreasonable way; and yet I believe it is done with a sore heart, and with an anxious desire for his good. And when my mother's face is most immovable, I have learned to know that she is trying to quiet the frightened beatings of her heart over the wrong-doings of her youngest boy."
"Lewis," his wife said, interrupting the next word, and with intense earnestness and solemnity in her voice, "we must save John for Christ, and his father and mother."
"Amen. But how, dear, how?"
"Lewis, let's go right downstairs. They are all at home; I noticed it as I came through the room; and they look so gloomy. Why shouldn't we all have a pleasant evening together? Did you ever read anything to them? I thought not. Now, don't you know they can't help enjoying your reading? I mean to try it right away."
"Read Shakespeare?" her husband asked dryly, albeit there was also dismay in his voice. To talk earnestly over a state of things, to wish that all was different, was one thing; and to plunge right into the midst of existing things, and try to make them differ, was quite another. His wife answered his question with a bright little laugh.
"No, I don't believe they would enjoy Shakespeare yet, though I am by no means sure that we can't have some good readings from him some time. But let me see; I have a book that I am certain they will all like. You never read it, and you ought to; it is worth any one's while to read it." And she let fall spool and scissors, and went in eagerness to the old-fashioned swinging-shelves, where she had arranged some of her favourite books, selecting one from among them. "Here it is," she said; "Estelle and I enjoyed this book wonderfully; so did papa. We read it while mamma was away one winter, when we were dreary without her. John will certainly be interested in the bear hunt; being a boy, he can't help it; and I know mother will like to hear about that poor mother down behind the beans."
"Behind the beans! What an extraordinary place for a mother to be! What was she doing there?"
"Wait until you read it, my dear. You will like the book; people of good sense always do."
"Thank you. But, Louise dear, do you think it a wise thing to try? Remember what a disastrous failure I made on Sabbath. I don't believe I am fitted for aggressive movements."
"I don't believe anybody but Christ knows yet whether your Sabbath effort was all a failure, Lewis; and I don't believe that you and I have any right with the results, if we did what we could. Besides, this is different. I know you can read. Come."
"I can't see to read from the light of a tallow candle; I always despised them."
"We will take the lamp," she said, with a defiant little nod of her head toward the pretty bronze figure that held a shapely kerosene lamp of newest pattern and improved burner, Lewis having searched the lamp-stores over for just the right sort of offering for his bride. "We will set it right beside mother, where it will throw just the right angle of light on her work, and yet be shaded from her eyes; and we will not hint, by word or glance, that she may possibly see better than she does by her candle. Come, Lewis, carry it; it is too heavy for me. I will bring the book and my work-basket."
"Mother despises dressing-gowns," her husband said, rising slowly, and casting regretful looks at Shakespeare, the open fire, and his lounging-chair, though it was neither the chair nor yet the book that held him, but a horrible shrinking from this attempt at innovation, and an almost certainty of disastrous failure.
"No, she doesn't; she only thinks so, because she isn't used to them, and doesn't realize how much they save coats. I'm going to make John one for Christmas, and a pair of slippers like those Estelle gave you last year, and she will like them very much; you see if she doesn't. Now we're ready."
IF the Sunday callers to the kitchen had astonished the family group, this descent upon them with work-basket, book, and, above all, lamp, fairly took from them the power of utterance—at least after Dorothy's first startled exclamation, when she retired into flushed silence.
"Lewis was going to read to me," explained Louise, in a tone intended to convey the idea that their proceeding was the most natural and ordinary one imaginable, "and I thought it was a pity to waste a new book on one person; so we came down for you all to hear. May I sit by you, mother?"
Without waiting for answer, the artful daughter-in-law took her pretty bronze lamp from her husband's hand, and, setting it in "just the right angle," drew one of the wooden-seated chairs, and settled herself near it before the audience had time to recover from its surprise.
"Now, Lewis, we're ready," she added, in complacent tone. She had resolved not to venture on the doubtful question as to whether they desired to hear any reading. If their consent was taken for granted, what could they do but listen?
Nevertheless John seemed resolved not to be taken by guile; he drew himself up, with a shuffling noise, and was evidently making ready for flight. Her husband telegraphed a significant glance at Louise, which said, as plainly as words could, that encouraging sentence, "I told you so; John won't stay." But she saw the whole, and, while her heart beat for the success of her scheme, her voice was prompt and assured.
"O John! Have you got to go to the barn so soon? Well, never mind, we'll wait for you. I selected this book on purpose, because I was so sure you would like it; it is a special favourite of mine."
Thus addressed, John, who had had no intention of going to the barn, but simply of escaping, sat down again, for very astonishment; and Lewis, who was both amazed and amused at his wife's boldness, promptly seized the opportunity to commence his book without further introduction.
It was nearly eight o'clock when the reading commenced, the usual hour for the family to separate, but for an unbroken hour Lewis Morgan's voice went steadily on. The shade of embarrassment which he felt at first speedily lost itself in his genuine interest in the book, new to him; and perhaps he never showed his reading powers to better advantage. Louise, to whom the story was an old one, had leisure to watch its effect on the group, and was more than satisfied with the hushed way in which Mother Morgan laid down her great shears on the uncovered stand, and finally transferred them to her lap, that their clatter might not make her lose a word; at the knitting which dropped from Dorothy's fingers, and lay unheeded, while she, unchid by mother, fixed what were certainly great hungry eyes on the reader, and took in every sentence; at the unwinking eyes of Father Morgan, who did not interrupt the hour by a single yawn; but, above all, at the gleam of intense satisfaction in John's face when the young minister came off victor. Besides, did she, or did she not, hear a quick, suddenly suppressed sigh coming from the mother's heart, as she listened to the story of that other mother's wrestlings in prayer in her closet, "down behind the beans." The loud-spoken clock, as it clanged out the hour of nine, was the first interruption to the reading since it struck eight; and Louise, mindful of the unwisdom of carrying her experiment too far, hastened to change the programme.
"Why, Lewis, it is nine o'clock! It won't do to read any more."
And Lewis, who had many an evening read until ten, and occasionally until eleven, to that other family group in the old home, looked up with obtuseness exactly like a man, and was about to ask, "Why not?" but the warning look in her eyes brought him back to the level of present experiences; and, despite Dorothy's hungry eyes and John's utter stillness indicating that he was entirely willing to hear more, the book was promptly closed.
"Well," said Farmer Morgan, drawing a long breath, "that minister in the book was a most likely chap as ever I heard of; if more of 'em acted like that, I should have a higher opinion of them than I do. It's a very well told story; now, that's a fact."
"A pack of lies, the whole of it." This from Mother Morgan; not said severely, but in a deprecatory tone, as though she felt herself obliged to say it, as a sort of punishment for having allowed herself to become interested.
"Well, now," said Farmer Morgan, dropping his head to one side, with a thoughtful air, "I don't know about that; there is nothing so dreadfully unlikely about it. And that smart chap had a streak of good luck and a streak of common sense; and I've known, myself, exactly such a family as that set of boys, father and all, hard as they were. Whether it is lies or not, it is told exactly as though it all might have happened. I don't object to hearing it, anyhow. It takes up the time, though; I had no idea it was nine o'clock."
"Nine o'clock isn't late," ventured Dorothy. "Stuart's folks sit up till ten nearly every evening; I always see a light in their front room when I go to bed."
"Yes, and they don't get up till long after daylight, and don't have breakfast until it's almost time for dinner. I never brought my children up to habits of that kind, thank fortune."
There was a good deal of sharpness in the mother's tone by this time. The reaction was coming over her; she was growing vexed to think she had allowed her heart to throb in sympathy with the trials of a mother whose experience was only a "pack of lies," forgetting for the moment that touches of the bitterness of that mother's experience over her youngest born had already come to her. If only she would make the experience of prayer her own!
Louise arose promptly; she was satisfied with her experiment, and judged it wise to beat an immediate retreat.
"Come, Lewis," she said, her hand on the pretty lamp; "if I am late to breakfast to-morrow morning, father will think it is a bad book. Isn't that a dainty design for a lamp-handle, mother?"
"It's a dangerous thing to carry around," the mother said grimly, meaning the lamp, and not the handle. "I never take up the paper that I don't read about an accident of some sort with kerosene lamps. If I could have had my way, there should never one of them have come into this house."