XIII.

‘Where congregations ne’er break up,And Sabbaths have no end.’

The dullest preachers are sure to give it out, and that when there are the greatest number of restless children wondering when it will be time to go home. It is only within ten years that modern hymn books have altered it, returning in part to the original.

“I do not think we have chosen the best parts of that hymn for our ‘service of song.’ You never read the whole of it? You don’t know how pretty it is! It is a relief from the customary palms and choirs. One’s whole heart is glad of the outlet of its sweet refrain,—

‘Would God that I were there!’

before one has half read it. You are quite ready to believe that

‘There is no hunger, heat, nor cold,Butpleasure every way.’

Listen to this:—

‘Thy houses are of ivory,Thy windows crystal clear,Thy tiles are made of beaten gold;O God, that I were there!‘We that are here in banishmentContinually do moan.. . . . . . . . . .‘Our sweet is mixed with bitter gall,Our pleasure is but pain,Our joys scarce last the looking on,Our sorrows still remain.‘But there they live in such delight,Such pleasure and such play,As that to them a thousand yearsDoth seem as yesterday.’

‘Thy houses are of ivory,Thy windows crystal clear,Thy tiles are made of beaten gold;O God, that I were there!

‘We that are here in banishmentContinually do moan.. . . . . . . . . .‘Our sweet is mixed with bitter gall,Our pleasure is but pain,Our joys scarce last the looking on,Our sorrows still remain.

‘But there they live in such delight,Such pleasure and such play,As that to them a thousand yearsDoth seem as yesterday.’

And this:—

‘Thy gardens and thy gallant walksContinually are green;There grow such sweet and pleasant flowersAs nowhere else are seen.‘There cinnamon, there sugar grows,There nard and balm abound,What tongue can tell, or heart conceiveThe joys that there are found?‘Quite through the streets, with silver sound,The flood of life doth flow,Upon whose banks, on every side,The wood of life doth grow.’

‘Thy gardens and thy gallant walksContinually are green;There grow such sweet and pleasant flowersAs nowhere else are seen.

‘There cinnamon, there sugar grows,There nard and balm abound,What tongue can tell, or heart conceiveThe joys that there are found?

‘Quite through the streets, with silver sound,The flood of life doth flow,Upon whose banks, on every side,The wood of life doth grow.’

I tell you we may learn something from that grand old Catholic singer. He is far nearer to the Bible than the innovators on his MSS. Do you not notice how like his images are to the inspired ones, and yet how pleasant and natural is the effect of the entire poem?

“There is nobody like Bonar, though, to sing about heaven. There is one of his, ‘We shall meet and rest,’—do you know it?”

I shook my head, and knelt down beside her and watched her face,—it was quite unconscious of me, the musing face,—while she repeated dreamily:—

“Where the faded flower shall freshen,—Freshen nevermore to fade;Where the shaded sky shall brighten,—Brighten nevermore to shade;Where the sun-blaze never scorches;Where the star-beams cease to chill;Where no tempest stirs the echoesOf the wood, or wave, or hill;....Where no shadow shall bewilder;Where life’s vain parade is o’er;Where the sleep of sin is broken,And the dreamer dreams no more;Where the bond is never severed,—Partings, claspings, sob and moan,Midnight waking, twilight weeping,Heavy noontide,—all are done;Where the child has found its mother;Where the mother finds the child;Where dear families are gathered,That were scattered on the wild;....Where the hidden wound is healed;Where the blighted life reblooms;Where the smitten heart the freshnessOf its buoyant youth resumes;....Where we find the joy of loving,As we never loved before,—Loving on, unchilled, unhindered,Loving once, forevermore.” ...

30th.

Aunt Winifred was weeding her day-lilies this morning, when the gate creaked timidly, and then swung noisily, and in walked Abinadab Quirk, with a bouquet of China pinks in the button-hole of his green-gray linen coat. He had taken evident pains to smarten himself up a little, for his hair was combed into two horizontaldabsover his ears, and the green-gray coat and blue-checked shirt-sleeves were quite clean; but he certainly is the most uncouth specimen of six feet five that it has ever been my privilege to behold. I feel sorry for him, though. I heard Meta Tripp laughing at himin Sunday school the other day,—“Quadrangular Quirk,” she called him, a little too loud, and the poor fellow heard her. He half turned, blushing fiercely; then slunk down in his corner with as pitiable a look as is often seen upon a man’s face.

He came up to Auntie awkwardly,—a part of the scene I saw from the window, and the rest she told me,—head hanging, and the tiny bouquet held out.

“Clo sent these to you,” he stammered out,—“my cousin Clo. I was coming ’long, and she thought, you know,—she’d get me, you see, to—to—that is, to—bring them. She sent her—that is—let me see. She sent her respect—ful—respectful—no, her love; that was it. She sent her love ’long with ’em.”

Mrs. Forceythe dropped her weeds, and held out her white, shapely hands, wet with the heavy dew, to take the flowers.

“O, thank you! Clo knows my fancy for pinks. How kind in you to bring them! Won’t you sit down a few moments? I was just going to rest a little. Do you like flowers?”

Abinadab eyed the white hands, as his huge fingers just touched them, with a sort of awe; and, sighing, sat down on the very edge of thegarden bench beside her. After a singular variety of efforts to take the most uncomfortable position of which he was capable, he succeeded to his satisfaction, and, growing then somewhat more at his ease, answered her question.

“Flowers are sechgassythings. They just blow out and that’s the end of ’em.Ilike machine-shops best.”

“Ah! well, that is a very useful liking. Do you ever invent machinery yourself?”

“Sometimes,” said Abinadab, with a bashful smile. “There’s a little improvement of mine for carpet-sweepers up before the patent-office now. Don’t know whether they’ll run it through. Some of the chaps I saw in Boston told me they thought they would do’t in time; it takes an awful sight of time. I’m alwers fussing over something of the kind; alwers did, sence I was a baby; had my little windmills and carts and things; used to sell ’em to the other young uns. Father don’t like it. He wants me to stick to the farm. I don’t like farming. I feel like a fish out of water.—Mrs. Forceythe, marm!”

He turned on her with an abrupt change of tone, so funny that she could with difficulty retain her gravity.

“I heard you saying a sight of queer things the other day about heaven. Clo, she’s been telling me a sight more. Now,Inever believed in heaven!”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t believe,” said the poor fellow, with sullen decision, “that a benevolent God ever would ha’ made sech a derned awkward chap as I am!”

Aunt Winifred replied by stepping into the house, and bringing out a fine photograph of one of the best of the St. Georges,—a rapt, yet very manly face, in which the saint and the hero are wonderfully blended.

“I suppose,” she said, putting it into his hands, “that if you should go to heaven, you would be as much fairer than that picture as that picture is fairer than you are now.”

“No! Why, would I, though? Jim-miny! Why, it would be worth going for, wouldn’t it?”

The words were no less reverently spoken than the vague rhapsodies of his father; for the sullenness left his face, and his eyes—which are pleasant, and not unmanly, when one fairly sees them—sparkled softly, like a child’s.

“Make it all up there, maybe?” musing,—“the girls laughing at you all your life, and all? That would be the bigger heft of the two then, wouldn’t it? for they say there ain’t any end to things up there. Why, so it might be fair in Him after all; more’n fair, perhaps. See here, Mrs. Forceythe, I’m not a church-member, you know, and father, he’s dreadful troubled about me; prays over me like a span of ministers, the old gentleman does, every Sunday night. Now, I don’t want to go to the other place any more than the next man, and I’ve had my times, too, of thinking I’d keep steady and say my prayers reg’lar,—it makes a chap feel on a sight better terms with himself,—but I don’t see howI’m going to wear white frocks and stand up in a choir,—never could sing no more’n a frog with a cold in his head,—it tires me more now, honest, to think of it, than it does to do a week’s mowing. Look at me! Do you s’pose I’m fit for it? Father, he’s always talking about the thrones, and the wings, and the praises, and the palms, and having new names in your foreheads, (shouldn’t object to that, though, by any means), till he drives me into the tool-house, or off on a spree. I tell him if God hain’t gota place where chaps like me can do something He’s fitted ’em to do in this world, there’s no use thinking about it anyhow.”

So Auntie took the honest fellow into her most earnest thought for half an hour, and argued, and suggested, and reproved, and helped him, as only she could do; and at the end of it seemed to have worked into his mind some distinct and not unwelcome ideas of what a Christ-like life must mean to him, and of the coming heaven which is so much more real to her than any life outside of it.

“And then,” she told him, “I imagine that your fancy for machinery will be employed in some way. Perhaps you will do a great deal more successful inventing there than you ever will here.”

“You don’t say so!” said radiant Abinadab.

“God will give you something to do, certainly, and something that you will like.”

“I might turn it to some religious purpose, you know!” said Abinadab, looking bright. “Perhaps I could help ’em build a church, or hist some of their pearl gates, or something like!”

Upon that he said that it was time to be athome and see to the oxen, and shambled awkwardly away.

Clo told us this afternoon that he begged the errand and the flowers from her. She says: “‘Bin thinks there never was anybody like you, Mrs. Forceythe, and ’Bin isn’t the only one, either.” At which Mrs. Forceythe smiles absently, thinking—I wonder of what.

Monday night.

I saw as funny and as pretty a bit of a drama this afternoon as I have seen for a long time.

Faith had been rolling out in the hot hay ever since three o’clock, with one of the little Blands, and when the shadows grew long they came in with flushed cheeks and tumbled hair, to rest and cool upon the door-steps. I was sitting in the parlor, sewing energetically on some sun-bonnets for some of Aunt Winifred’s people down town,—I found the heat to be more bearable if I kept busy,—and could see, unseen, all the littletableauxinto which the two children grouped themselves; a new one every instant; in the shadow now,—now in a quiver of golden glow; the wind tossing their hair about, and their chatter chiming down the hall like bells.

“O what a funny little sunset there’s going to be behind the maple-tree,” said the blond-haired Bland, in a pause.

“Funny enough,” observed Faith, with her superior smile, “but it’s going to be a great deal funnier up in heaven, I tell you, Molly Bland.”

“Funny in heaven? Why, Faith!” Molly drew herself up with a religious air, and looked the image of her father.

“Yes, to be sure. I’m going to have some little pink blocks made out of it when I go; pink and yellow and green and purple and—O, so many blocks! I’m going to have a little red cloud to sail round in, like that one up over the house, too, I shouldn’t wonder.”

Molly opened her eyes.

“O, I don’t believe it!”

“Youdon’t know much!” said Miss Faith, superbly. “I shouldn’t s’pose you would believe it. P’r’aps I’ll have some strawberries too, and some ginger-snaps,—I’m not going to have any old bread and butter up there,—O, and some little gold apples, and a lot of playthings; nicer playthings—why, nicer than they have in the shops in Boston, Molly Bland! God’s keeping ’em up there a purpose.”

“Dear me!” said incredulous Molly, “I should just like to know who told you that much. My mother never told it at me. Did your mother tell it at you?”

“O, she told me some of it, and the rest I thinked out myself.”

“Let’s go and play One Old Cat,” said Molly, with an uncomfortable jump; “I wish I hadn’t got to go to heaven!”

“Why, Molly Bland! why, I think heaven’s splendid! I’ve got my papa up there, you know. ‘Here’s my little girl!’ That’s what he’s going to say. Mamma, she’ll be there, too, and we’re all going to live in the prettiest house. I have dreadful hurries to go this afternoon sometimes when Phœbe’s cross and won’t give me sugar. They don’t let you in, though, ’nless you’re a good girl.”

“Who gets it all up?” asked puzzled Molly.

“Jesus Christ will give me all these beautiful fings,” said Faith, evidently repeating her mother’s words,—the only catechism that she has been taught.

“And what will he do when he sees you?” asked her mother, coming down the stairs and stepping up behind her.

“Take me up in His arms and kiss me.”

“And what will Faith say?”

“Fank—you!” said the child, softly.

In another minute she was absorbed, body and soul, in the mysteries of One Old Cat.

“But I don’t think she will feel much like being naughty for half an hour to come,” her mother said; “hear how pleasantly her words drop! Such a talk quiets her, like a hand laid on her head. Mary, sometimes I think it is His very hand, as much as when He touched those other little children. I wish Faith to feel at home with Him and His home. Little thing! I really do not think that she is conscious of any fear of dying; I do not think it means anything to her but Christ, and her father, and pink blocks, and a nice time, and never disobeying me, or being cross. Many a time she wakes me up in the morning talking away to herself, and when I turn and look at her, she says: ‘O mamma, won’t we go to heaven to-day, you fink?Whenwill we go, mamma?’”

“If there had been any pink blocks and ginger-snaps for me when I was at her age, I should not have prayed every night to ‘die out.’ I think the horrors of death that children live through, unguessed and unrelieved,are awful. Faith may thank you all her life that she has escaped them.”

“I should feel answerable to God for the child’s soul, if I had not prevented that. I always wanted to know what sort of mother that poor little thing had, who asked, if she wereverygood up in heaven, whether they wouldn’t let her go down to hell Saturday afternoons, and play a little while!”

“I know. But think of it,—blocks and ginger-snaps!”

“I treat Faith just as the Bible treats us, by dealing inpicturesof truth that she can understand. I can make Clo and Abinadab Quirk comprehend that their pianos and machinery may not be made of literal rosewood and steel, but will be some synonyme of the thing, which will answer just such wants of their changed natures as rosewood and steel must answer now. There will be machinery and pianos in the same sense in which there will be pearl gates and harps. Whatever enjoyment any or all of them represent now, something will represent then.

“But Faith, if I told her that her heavenly ginger-snaps would not be made of molasses and flour, would have a cry, for fear that shewas not going to have any ginger-snaps at all; so, until she is older, I give her unqualified ginger-snaps. The principal joy of a child’s life consists in eating. Faith begins, as soon as the light wanes, to dream of that gum-drop which she is to have at bedtime. I don’t suppose she can outgrow that at once by passing out of her little round body. She must begin where she left off,—nothing but a baby, though it will be as holy and happy a baby as Christ can make it. When she says: “Mamma, I shall be hungery and want my dinner, up there,” I never hesitate to tell her that she shall have her dinner. She would never, in her secret heart, though she might not have the honesty to say so, expect to be otherwise than miserable in a dinnerless eternity.”

“You are not afraid of misleading the child’s fancy?”

“Not so long as I can keep the two ideas—that Christ is her best friend, and that heaven is not meant for naughty girls—pre-eminent in her mind. And I sincerely believe that He would give her the very pink blocks which she anticipates, no less than He would give back a poet his lost dreams, or you your brother. He has been a child; perhaps, incidentallyto the unsolved mysteries of atonement, for this very reason,—that He may know how to ‘prepare their places’ for them, whose angels do always behold His Father. Ah, you may be sure that, if of such is the happy Kingdom, He will not scorn to stoop and fit it to their little needs.

“There was that poor little fellow whose guinea-pig died,—do you remember?”

“Only half; what was it?”

“‘O mamma,’ he sobbed out, behind his handkerchief, ‘don’t great big elephants have souls?’

“‘No, my son.’

“‘Nor camels, mamma?’

“‘No.’

“‘Nor bears, nor alligators, nor chickens?’

“‘O no, dear.’

“‘O mamma, mamma! Don’t littleCLEAN—white—guinea-pigshave souls?’

“I never should have had the heart to say no to that; especially as we have no positive proof to the contrary.

“Then that scrap of a boy who lost his little red balloon the morning he bought it, and, broken-hearted, wanted to know whether it had gone to heaven. Don’t I suppose if hehad been taken there himself that very minute, that he would have found a little balloon in waiting for him? How can I help it?”

“It has a pretty sound. If people would not think it so material and shocking—”

“Let people read Martin Luther’s letter to his little boy. There is the testimony of a pillar in good and regular standing! I don’t think you need be afraid of my balloon, after that.”

I remembered that there was a letter of his on heaven, but, not recalling it distinctly, I hunted for it to-night, and read it over. I shall copy it, the better to retain it in mind.

“Grace and peace in Christ, my dear little son. I see with pleasure that thou learnest well, and prayed diligently. Do so, my son, and continue. When I come home I will bring thee a pretty fairing.

“I know a pretty, merry garden wherein are many children. They have little golden coats, and they gather beautiful apples under the trees, and pears, cherries, plums, and wheat-plums;—they sing, and jump, and are merry. They have beautiful little horses, too, with gold bits and silver saddles. And I asked the man to whom the garden belongs, whose childrenthey were. And he said: ‘They are the children that love to pray and to learn, and are good.’ Then said I: ‘Dear man, I have a son, too; his name is Johnny Luther. May he not also come into this garden and eat these beautiful apples and pears, and ride these fine horses?’ Then the man said: ‘If he loves to pray and to learn, and is good, he shall come into this garden, and Lippus and Jost too; and when they all come together, they shall have fifes and trumpets, lutes and all sorts of music, and they shall dance, and shoot with little cross-bows.’

“And he showed me a fine meadow there in the garden, made for dancing. There hung nothing but golden fifes, trumpets, and fine silver cross-bows. But it was early, and the children had not yet eaten; therefore I could not wait the dance, and I said to the man: ‘Ah, dear sir! I will immediately go and write all this to my little son Johnny, and tell him to pray diligently, and to learn well, and to be good, so that he also may come to this garden. But he has an Aunt Lehne, he must bring her with him.’ Then the man said: ‘It shall be so; go, and write him so.’

“Therefore, my dear little son Johnny, learnand pray away! and tell Lippus and Jost, too that they must learn and pray. And then you shall come to the garden together. Herewith I commend thee to Almighty God. And greet Aunt Lehne, and give her a kiss for my sake.

“Thy dear Father,

“Martinus Luther.

“Anno1530.”

August 3.

The summer is sliding quietly away,—my desolate summer which I dreaded; with the dreams gone from its wild flowers, the crown from its sunsets, the thrill from its winds and its singing.

But I have found out a thing. One can live without dreams and crowns and thrills.

I have not lost them. They lie under the ivied cross with Roy for a little while. They will come back to me with him. “Nothing is lost,” she teaches me. And until they come back, I see—for she shows me—fields groaning under their white harvest, with laborers very few. Ruth followed the sturdy reapers, gleaning a little. I, perhaps, can do as much. The ways in which I must work seem so small and insignificant, so pitifully trivial sometimes, that I do not even like to write them down here. In fact, they are so small that, six months ago, I did not see them at all. Only to be pleasant to old Phœbe, and charitable toMeta Tripp, and faithful to mynotvery interesting little scholars, and a bit watchful of worn-out Mrs. Bland, and—But dear me, I won’t! Theyareso little!

But one’s self becomes of less importance, which seems to be the point.

It seems very strange to me sometimes, looking back to those desperate winter days, what a change has come over my thoughts of Roy. Not that he is any less—O, never any less to me. But it is almost as if she had raised him from the grave. Why seek ye the living among the dead? Her soft, compassionate eyes shine with the question every hour. And every hour he is helping me,—ah, Roy, we understand one another now.

How he must love Aunt Winifred! How pleasant the days will be when we can talk her over, and thank her together!

“To be happy because Roy is happy.” I remember how those first words of hers struck me. It does not seem to me impossible, now.

Aunt Winifred and I laugh at each other for talking so much about heaven. I see that the green book is filled with my questions andher answers. The fact is, not that we do not talk as much about mundane affairs as other people, but that this one thing interests us more.

If, instead, it had been flounces, or babies, or German philosophy, the green book would have filled itself just as unconsciously with flounces, or babies, or German philosophy. This interest in heaven is of course no sign of especial piety in me, nor could people with young, warm, uncrushed hopes throbbing through their days be expected to feel the same. It is only the old principle of, where the treasure is—the heart.

“How spiritual-minded Mary has grown!” Mrs. Bland observes, regarding me respectfully. I try in vain to laugh her out of the conviction. If Roy had not gone before, I should think no more, probably, about the coming life, than does the minister’s wife herself.

But now—I cannot help it—that is the reality, this the dream; that the substance, this the shadow.

The other day Aunt Winifred and I had a talk which has been of more value to me than all the rest.

Faith was in bed; it was a cold, rainy evening; we were secure from callers; we lighted a few kindlers in the parlor grate; she rolled up the easy-chair, and I took my cricket at her feet.

“Paul at the feet of Gamaliel! This is what I call comfort. Now, Auntie, let us go to heaven awhile.”

“Very well. What do you want there now?”

I paused a moment, sobered by a thought that has been growing steadily upon me of late.

“Something more, Aunt Winifred. All these other things are beautiful and dear; but I believe I want—God.

“You have not said much about Him. The Bible says a great deal about Him. You have given me the filling-up of heaven in all its pleasant promise, but—I don’t know—there seems to be an outline wanting.”

She drew my hand up into hers, smiling.

“I have not done my painting by artistic methods, I know; but it was not exactly accidental.

“Tell me, honestly,—is God more to you or less, a more distinct Being or a more vagueone, than He was six months ago? Is He, or is He not, dearer to you now than then?”

I thought about it a minute, and then turned my face up to her.

“Mary, what a light in your eyes! How is it?”

It came over me slowly, but it came with such a passion of gratitude and unworthiness, that I scarcely knew how to tell her—that He never has been to me, in all my life, what he is now at the end of these six months. He was once an abstract Grandeur which I struggled more in fear than love to please. He has become a living Presence, dear and real.

“No dead fact stranded on the shoreOf the oblivious years;But warm, sweet, tender, even yetA present help.” ...

He was an inexorable Mystery who took Roy from me to lose him in the glare of a more inexorable heaven. He is a Father who knew better than we that we should be parted for a while; but He only means it to be a little while. He is keeping him for me to find in the flush of some summer morning, on which I shall open my eyes no less naturally than I open them on June sunrises now. I always have that fancy of going in the morning.

She understood what I could not tell her, and said, “I thought it would be so.”

“You, His interpreter, have done it,” I answered her. “His heaven shows what He is,—don’t you see?—like a friend’s letter. I could no more go back to my old groping relations to Him, than I could make of you the dim and somewhat apocryphal Western Auntie that you were before I saw you.”

“Which was precisely why I have dealt with this subject as I have,” she said. “You had all your life been directed to an indefinite heaven, where the glory of God was to crowd out all individuality and all human joy from His most individual and human creatures, till the “Glory of God” had become nothing but a name and a dread to you. So I let those three words slide by, and tried to bring you to them, as Christ brought the Twelve to believe in him, ‘for the works’ sake.’

“Yes, my child; clinging human loves, stifled longings, cries for rest, forgotten hopes, shall have their answer. Whatever the bewilderment of beauties folded away for us in heavenly nature and art, they shall strive with each other to make us glad. These things have their pleasant place. But, through eternity,there will be always something beyond and dearer than the dearest of them. God himself will be first,—naturally and of necessity, without strain or struggle,first.”

When I sat here last winter with my dead in my house, those words would have roused in me an agony of wild questionings. I should have beaten about them and beaten against them, and cried in my honest heart that they were false. Iknewthat I loved Roy more than I loved such a Being as God seemed to me then to be. Now, they strike me as simply and pleasantly true. The more I love Roy, the more I love Him. He loves us both.

“You see it could not be otherwise,” she went on, speaking low. “Where would you be, or I, or they who seem to us so much dearer and better than ourselves, if it were not for Jesus Christ? What can heaven be to us, but a song of the love that is the same to us yesterday, to-day, and forever,—that, in the mystery of an intensity which we shall perhaps never understand, could choose death and be glad in the choosing, and, what is more than that, could livelifefor us for three-and-thirty years?

“I cannot strain my faith—or rather mycommon sense—to the rhapsodies with which many people fill heaven. But it seems to me like this: A friend goes away from us, and it may be seas or worlds that lie between us, and we love him. He leaves behind him his little keepsakes; a lock of hair to curl about our fingers; a picture that has caught the trick of his eyes or smile; a book, a flower, a letter. What we do with the curling hair, what we say to the picture, what we dream over the flower and the letter, nobody knows but ourselves. People have risked life for such mementoes. Yet who loves the senseless gift more than the giver,—the curl more than the young forehead on which it fell,—the letter more than the hand which traced it?

“So it seems to me that we shall learn to see in God the centre of all possibilities of joy. The greatest of these lesser delights is but the greater measure of His friendship. They will not mean less of pleasure, but more of Him. They will not “pale,” as Dr. Bland would say. Human dearness will wax, not wane, in heaven; but human friends will be loved for love of Him.”

“I see; that helps me; like a torch in a dark room. But there will be shadows in the corners.Do you suppose that we shall everfullyfeel it in the body?”

“In the body, probably not. We see through a glass so darkly that the temptation to idolatry is always our greatest. Golden images did not die with Paganism. At times I fancy that, somewhere between this world and another, a revelation will come upon us like a flash, of whatsinreally is,—such a revelation, lighting up the lurid background of our past in such colors, that the consciousness of what Christ has done for us will be for a time as much as heart can bear. After that, the mystery will be, not how to love Him most, but that we evercouldhave loved any creature or thing as much.”

“We serve God quite as much by active work as by special prayer, here,” I said after some thought; “how will it be there?”

“We must be busily at work certainly; but I think there must naturally be more communion with Him then. Now, this phrase “communion with God” has been worn, and not always well worn.

“Prayer means to us, in this life, more often penitent confession than happy interchange of thought with Him. It is associated, too, withaching limbs and sleepy eyes, and nights when the lamp goes out. Obstacles, moral and physical, stand in the way of our knowing exactly what it may mean in the ideal of it.

“My best conception of it lies in thefriendshipof the man Christ Jesus. I suppose he will bear with him, eternally, the humanity which he took up with him from the Judean hills. I imagine that we shall see him in visible form like ourselves, among us, yet not of us; that he, himself, is “Gott mit ihnen”; that we shall talk with him as a man talketh with his friend. Perhaps, bowed and hushed at his dear feet, we shall hear from his own lips the story of Nazareth, of Bethany, of Golgotha, of the chilly mountains where he used to pray all night long for us; of the desert places where he hungered; of his cry for help—think, Mary—His!—when there was not one in all the world to hear it, and there was silence in heaven, while angels strengthened him and man forsook him. Perhaps his voice—the very voice which has sounded whispering through our troubled life—“Could ye not watch one hour?”—shall unfold its perplexed meanings; shall make its rough places plain; shall show us step by step the merciful wayby which he led us to the hour; shall point out to us, joy by joy, the surprises that he has been planning for us, just as the old father in the story planned to surprise his wayward boy come home.

“And such a ‘communion,’—which is not too much, nor yet enough, to dare to expect of a God who was the ‘friend’ of Abraham, who ‘walked’ with Enoch, who did not call fishermen his servants,—suchwill be that ‘presence of God,’ that ‘adoration,’ on which we have looked from afar off with despairing eyes that wept, they were so dazzled, and turned themselves away as from the thing they greatly feared.”

I think we neither of us cared to talk for a while after this. Something made me forget even that I was going to see Roy in heaven. “Three-and-thirty years. Three-and-thirty years.” The words rang themselves over.

“It is on the humanity of Christ,” she said after some musing, “that all my other reasons for hoping for such a heaven as I hope for, rest for foundation. He knows exactly what we are, for he has been one of us; exactly what we hope and fear and crave, for he has hoped and feared and craved, not the less humanly, but only more intensely.

“‘If it were not so,’—do you take in the thoughtful tenderness of that? A mother, stilling her frightened child in the dark, might speak just so,—‘if it were not so, I would have told you.’ That brooding love makes room for all that we can want. He has sounded every deep of a troubled and tempted life. Who so sure as he to understand how to prepare a place where troubled and tempted lives may grow serene? Further than this; since he stands as our great Type, no less in death and after than before it, he answers for us many of these lesser questions on the event of which so much of our happiness depends.

“Shall we lose our personality in a vague ocean of ether,—you one puff of gas, I another?—

“He, with his own wounded body, rose and ate and walked and talked.

“Is all memory of this life to be swept away?—

“He, arisen, has forgotten nothing. He waits to meet his disciples at the old, familiar places; as naturally as if he had never been parted from them, he falls in with the current of their thoughts.

“Has any one troubled us with fears that inthe glorified crowds of heaven we may miss a face dearer than all the world to us?—

“He made himself known to his friends; Mary, and the two at Emmaus, and the bewildered group praying and perplexed in their bolted room.

“Do we weary ourselves with speculations whether human loves can outlive the shock of death?—

“Mary knew how He loved her, when, turning, she heard him call her by her name. They knew, whose hearts ‘burned within them while he talked with them by the way, and when he tarried with them, the day being far spent.’”

“And for the rest?”

“For the rest, about which He was silent, we can trust him, and if, trusting, we please ourselves with fancies, he would be the last to think it blame to us. There is one promise which grows upon me the more I study it, ‘He that spared not his own Son, how shall he not alsowith him freely give us all things?’ Sometimes I wonder if that does not infold a beautifuldouble entendre, a hint of much that you and I have conjectured,—as one throws down a hint of a surprise to a child.

“Then there is that pledge to those who seek first His kingdom: ‘All these things shall be added unto you.’ ‘These things,’ were food and clothing, were varieties of material delight, and the words were spoken to men who lived hungry, beggared, and died the death of outcasts. If this passage could be taken literally, it would be very significant in its bearing on the future life; for Christ must keep his promise to the letter, in one world or another. It may be wrenching the verse, not as a verse, but from the grain of the argument, to insist on the literal interpretation,—though I am not sure.”

August 15.

I asked the other day, wondering whether all ministers were like Dr. Bland, what Uncle Forceythe used to believe about heaven.

“Very much what I do,” she said. “These questions were brought home to him, early in life, by the death of a very dear sister; he had thought much about them. I think one of the things that so much attached his people to him was the way he had of weaving their future life in with this, till it grew naturally and pleasantly into their frequent thought. O yes, your uncle supplied me with half of my proof-texts.”

Aunt Winifred has not looked quite well of late, I fancy; though it may be only fancy. She has not spoken of it, except one day when I told her that she looked pale. It was the heat, she said.

20th.

Little Clo came over to-night. I believe she thinks Aunt Winifred the best friend shehas in the world. Auntie has become much attached to all her scholars, and has a rare power of winning her way into their confidence. They come to her with all their little interests,—everything, from saving their souls to trimming a bonnet. Clo, however, is the favorite, as I predicted.

She looked a bit blue to-night, as girls will look; in fact, her face always has a tinge of sadness about it. Aunt Winifred, understanding at a glance that the child was not in a mood to talk before a third, led her away into the garden, and they were gone a long time. When it grew dark, I saw them coming up the path, Clo’s hand locked in her teacher’s, and her face, which was wet, upturned like a child’s. They strolled to the gate, lingered a little to talk, and then Clo said good night without coming in.

Auntie sat for a while after she had gone, thinking her over, I could see.

“Poor thing!” she said at last, half to herself, half to me,—“poor little foolish thing! This is where the dreadful individuality of a human soul irks me. There comes a point, beyond which youcan’thelp people.”

“What has happened to Clo?”

“Nothing, lately. It has been happening for two years. Two miserable years are an eternity, at Clo’s age. It is the old story,—a summer boarder; a little flirting; a little dreaming; a little pain; then autumn, and the nuts dropping on the leaves, and he was gone,—and knew not what he did,—and the child waked up. There was the future; to bake and sweep, to go to sewing-circles, and sing in the choir, and bear the moonlight nights,—and she loved him. She has lived through two years of it, and she loves him now. Reason will not reach such a passion in a girl like Clo. I did not tell her that she would put it away with other girlish things, and laugh at it herself some happy day, as women have laughed at their young fancies before her; partly because that would be a certain way of repelling her confidence,—she does not believe it, and my believing could not make her; partly because I am not quite sure about it myself. Clo has a good deal of the woman about her; her introspective life is intense. She may cherish this sweet misery as she does her musical tastes, till it has struck deep root. There is nothing in the excellent Mrs. Bentley’s household, nor in Homer anywhere, todraw the girl out from herself in time to prevent the dream from becoming a reality.”

“Poor little thing! What did you say to her?”

“You ought to have heard what she said to me! I wish I were at liberty to tell you the whole story. What troubles her most is that it is not going to help the matter any to die. ‘O Mrs. Forceythe,’ she says, in a tone that is enough to give the heart-ache, even to such an old woman as Mrs. Forceythe, ‘O Mrs. Forceythe, what is going to become of me up there? He never loved me, you see, and he never, never will, and he will have some beautiful, good wife of his own, and I won’t haveanybody! For I can’t love anybody else,—I’ve tried; I tried just as hard as I could to love my cousin ’Bin; he’s real good, and—I’m—afraid ’Bin likes me, though I guess he likes his carpet-sweepers better. O, sometimes I think, and think, till it seems as if I could not bear it! I don’t see how God canmakeme happy. I wish I could be buried up and go to sleep, and never have any heaven!’”

“And you told her—?”

“That she should have him there. That is, if not himself, something,—somebody whowould so much more than fill his place, that she would never have a lonely or unloved minute. Her eyes brightened, and shaded, and pondered, doubting. She ‘didn’t see how it could ever be.’ I told her not to try and see how, but to leave it to Christ. He knew all about this little trouble of hers, and he would make it right.

“‘Will he?’ she questioned, sighing; ‘but there are so many of us! There’s ’Bin, and a plenty more, and I don’t see how it’s going to be smoothed out. Everything is in a jumble, Mrs. Forceythe, don’t you see? for some peoplecan’tlike and keep liking so many times.’ Something came into my mind about the rough places that shall be made plain, and the crooked things straight. I tried to explain to her, and at last I kissed away her tears, and sent her home, if not exactly comforted, a little less miserable, I think, than when she came. Ah, well,—I wonder myself sometimes about these ‘crooked things’; but, though I wonder, I never doubt.”

She finished her sentence somewhat hurriedly, and half started from her chair, raising both hands with a quick, involuntary motion that attracted my notice. The lights came in justthen, and, unless I am much mistaken, her face showed paler than usual; but when I asked her if she felt faint, she said, “O no, I believe I am a little tired, and will go to bed.”

September 1.

I am glad that the summer is over. This heat has certainly worn on Aunt Winifred, with that kind of wear which slides people into confirmed invalidism. I suppose she would bear it in her saintly way, as she bears everything, but it would be a bitter cup for her. I know she was always pale, but this is a paleness which—

Night.

A dreadful thing has happened!

I was in the middle of my sentence, when I heard a commotion in the street, and a child’s voice shouting incoherently something about the doctor, and “mother’s killed! O, mother’s killed! mother’s burnt to death!” I was at the window in time to see a blond-haired girl running wildly past the house, and to see that it was Molly Bland.

At the same moment I saw Aunt Winifred snatching her hat from its nail in the entry. She beckoned to me to follow, and we werehalf-way over to the parsonage before I had a distinct thought of what I was about.

We came upon a horrible scene. Dr. Bland was trying to do everything alone; there was not a woman in the house to help him, for they have never been able to keep a servant, and none of the neighbors had had time to be there before us. The poor husband was growing faint, I think. Aunt Winifred saw by a look that he could not bear much more, sent him after Molly for the doctor, and took everything meantime into her own charge.

I shall not write down a word of it. It was a sight that, once seen, will never leave me as long as I live. My nerves are thoroughly shaken by it, and it must be put out of thought as far as possible.

It seems that the little boy—the baby—crept into the kitchen by himself, and began to throw the contents of the match-box on the stove, “to make a bonfire,” the poor little fellow said. In five minutes his apron was ablaze. His mother was on the spot at his first cry, and smothered the little apron, and saved the child, but her dress was muslin, and everybody was too far off to hear her at first,—and by the time her husband came in from the garden it was too late.

She is living yet. Her husband, pacing the room back and forth, and crouching on his knees by the hour, is praying God to let her die before the morning.

Morning.

There is no chance of life, the doctor says. But he has been able to find something that has lessened her sufferings. She lies partially unconscious.

Wednesday night.

Aunt Winifred and I were over at the parsonage to-night, when she roused a little from her stupor and recognized us. She spoke to her husband, and kissed me good by, and asked for the children. They were playing softly in the next room; we sent for them, and they came in,—the four unconscious, motherless little things,—with the sunlight in their hair.

The bitterness of death came into her marred face at sight of them, and she raised her hands to Auntie—to the only other mother there—with a sudden helpless cry: “I could bear it, I could bear it, if it weren’t forthem. Without any mother all their lives,—such little things,—and to go away where I can’t do a singlethingfor them!”

Aunt Winifred stooped down and spoke low, but decidedly.

“Youwilldo for them. God knows all about it. He will not send you away from them. You shall be just as much their mother, every day of their lives, as you have been here. Perhaps there is something to do for them which you never could have done here. He sees. He loves them. He loves you.”

If I could paint, I might paint the look that struck through and through that woman’s dying face; but words cannot touch it. If I were Aunt Winifred, I should bless God on my knees to-night for having shown me how to give such ease to a soul in death.

Thursday morning.

God is merciful. Mrs. Bland died at five o’clock.

10th.

How such a voice from the heavens shocks one out of the repose of calm sorrows and of calm joys. This has come and gone so suddenly that I cannot adjust it to any quiet and trustful thinking yet.

The whole parish mourns excitedly; for, though they worked their minister’s wife hard,they loved her well. I cannot talk it over with the rest. It jars. Horror should never be dissected. Besides, my heart is too full of those four little children with the sunlight in their hair and the unconsciousness in their eyes.

15th.

Mrs. Quirk came over to-day in great perplexity. She had just come from the minister’s.

“I don’t know what we’re a goin’ to do with him!” she exclaimed in a gush of impatient, uncomprehending sympathy; “you can’t let a man take on that way much longer. He’ll worry himself sick, and then we shall either lose him or have to pay his bills to Europe! Why, he jest stops in the house, and walks his study up and down, day and night; or else he jest sets and sets and don’t notice nobody but the children. Now I’ve jest ben over makin’ him some chicken-pie,—he used to set a sight by my chicken-pie,—and he made believe to eat it, ’cause I’d ben at the trouble, I suppose, but how much do you suppose he swallowed? Jest three mouthfuls! Thinks says I, I won’t spend my time over chicken-pie for the afflicted agin, and on ironing-day, too! When Iknocked at the study door, he said, ‘Come in, and stopped his walkin’ and turned as quick.

“‘O,’ says he, ‘good morning. I thought it was Mrs. Forceythe.’

“I told him no, I wasn’t Mrs. Forceythe, but I’d come to comfort him in his sorrer all the same. But that’s the only thing I have agin our minister. He won’tbecomforted. Mary Ann Jacobs, who’s ben there kind of looking after the children and things for him, you know, sence the funeral—she says he’s asked three or four times for you, Mrs. Forceythe. There’s ben plenty of his people in to see him, but you haven’t ben nigh him, Mary Ann says.”

“I stayed away because I thought the presence of friends at this time would be an intrusion,” Auntie said; “but if he would like to see me, that alters the case. I will go, certainly.”

“I don’t know,” suggested Mrs. Quirk, looking over the tops of her spectacles,—“I s’pose it’s proper enough, but you bein’ a widow, you know, and his wife—”

Aunt Winifred’s eyes shot fire. She stood up and turned upon Mrs. Quirk with a look the like of which I presume that worthy lady had never seen before, and is not likely to seesoon again (it gave the beautiful scorn of a Zenobia to her fair, slight face), moved her lips slightly, but said nothing, put on her bonnet, and went straight to Dr. Bland’s.

The minister, they told her, was in his study. She knocked lightly at the door, and was bidden in a lifeless voice to enter.

Shades and blinds were drawn, and the glare of the sun quite shut out. Dr. Bland sat by his study-table, with his face upon his hands. A Bible lay open before him. It had been lately used; the leaves were wet.

He raised his head dejectedly, but smiled when he saw who it was. He had been thinking about her, he said, and was glad that she had come.

I do not know all that passed between them, but I gather, from such hints as Auntie in her unconsciousness throws out, that she had things to say which touched some comfortless places in the man’s heart. No Greek and Hebrew “original,” no polished dogma, no link in his stereotyped logic, not one of his eloquent sermons on the future state, came to his relief.

These were meant for happy days. They rang cold as steel upon the warm needs of an afflicted man. Brought face to face, andsharply, with the blank heaven of his belief, he stood up from before his dead, and groped about it, and cried out against it in the bitterness of his soul.

“I had no chance to prepare myself to bow to the will of God,” he said, his reserved ministerial manner in curious contrast with the caged way in which he was pacing the room,—“I had no chance. I am taken by surprise, as by a thief in the night. I had a great deal to say to her, and there was no time. She could tell me what to do with my poor little children. I wanted to tell her other things. I wanted to tell her—Perhaps we all of us have our regrets when the Lord removes our friends; we may have done or left undone many things; we might have made them happier. My mind does not rest with assurance in its conceptions of the heavenly state. If I never can tell her—”

He stopped abruptly, and paced into the darkest shadows of the shadowed room, his face turned away.

“You said once some pleasant things about heaven?” he said at last, half appealingly, stopping in front of her, hesitating; like a man and like a minister, hardly ready to come withall the learning of his schools and commentators and sit at the feet of a woman.

She talked with him for a time in her unobtrusive way, deferring, when she honestly could, to his clerical judgment, and careful not to wound him by any word; but frankly and clearly, as she always talks.

When she rose to go he thanked her quietly.

“This is a somewhat novel train of thought to me,” he said; “I hope it may not prove an unscriptural one. I have been reading the book of Revelation to-day with these questions especially in mind. We are never too old to learn. Some passages may be capable of other interpretations than I have formerly given them. No matter what Iwish, you see, I must be guided by the Word of my God.”

Auntie says that she never respected the man so much as she did when, hearing those words, she looked up into his haggard face, convulsed with its human pain and longing.

“I hope you do not think thatIam not guided by the Word of God,” she answered. “I mean to be.”

“I know you mean to be,” he said cordially. “I do not say that you are not. I may come to see that you are, and that you are right.It will be a peaceful day for me if I can ever quite agree with your methods of reasoning. But I must think these things over. I thank you once more for coming. Your sympathy is grateful to me.”

Just as she closed the door he called her back.

“See,” he said, with a saddened smile. “At least I shall never preachthisagain. It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done.”

He held up before her a mass of old blue manuscript, and threw it, as he spoke, upon the embers left in his grate. It smoked and blazed up and burned out.

It was that sermon on heaven of which there is an abstract in this journal.

20th.

Aunt Winifred hired Mr. Tripp’s gray this afternoon, and drove to East Homer on some unexplained errand. She did not invite me to go with her, and Faith, though she teased impressively, was left at home. Her mother was gone till late,—so late that I had begun to be anxious about her, and heard through the dark the first sound of the buggy wheels, withgreat relief. She looked very tired when I met her at the gate. She had not been able, she said, to accomplish her errand at East Homer, and from there had gone to Worcester by railroad, leaving Old Gray at the East Homer Eagle till her return. She told me nothing more, and I asked no questions.

Sunday.

Faith has behaved like a witch all day. She knocked down three crickets and six hymn-books in church this morning, and this afternoon horrified the assembled and devout congregation by turning round in the middle of the long prayer, and, in a loud and distinct voice, asking Mrs. Quirk for “‘nother those pepp’mints such as you gave me one Sunday a good many years ago, you ’member.” After church, her mother tried a few Bible questions to keep her still.

“Faith, who was Christ’s father?”

“Jerusalem!” said Faith, promptly.

“Where did his parents take Jesus when they fled from Herod?”

“O, to Europe. Of course I knew that! Everybody goes to Europe.”

To-night, when her mother had put her to bed, she came down laughing.

“Faith does seem to have a hard time withthe Lord’s Prayer. To-night, being very sleepy and in a hurry to finish, she proceeded with great solemnity:—‘Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work, and—Oh!’

“I was just thinking how amused her father must be.”

Auntie says many such things. I cannot explain how pleasantly they strike me, nor how they help me.

29th.

Dr. Bland gave us a good sermon yesterday. There is an indescribable change in all his sermons. There is a change, too, in the man, and that something more than the haggardness of grief. I not only respect him and am sorry for him, but I feel more ready to be taught by him than ever before. A certain indefinablehumannesssoftens his eyes and tones, and seems to be creeping into everything that he says. Yet, on the other hand, his people say that they have never heard him speak such pleasant, helpful things concerning his and their relations to God. I met him the other night, coming away from his wife’s grave, and was struck by the expression of his face. I wondered if he were not slowly findingthe “peaceful day,” of which he told Aunt Winifred.

She, by the way, has taken another of her mysterious trips to Worcester.

30th.

We were wondering to-day where it will be,—I mean heaven.

“It is impossible to do more than wonder,” Auntie said, “though we are explicitly told that there will be new heavensanda new earth, which seems, if anything can be taken literally in the Bible, to point to this world as the future home of at least some of us.”

“Not for all of us, of course?”

“I don’t feel sure. I know that somebody spent his valuable time in estimating that all the people who have lived and died upon the earth would cover it, alive or buried, twice over; but I know that somebody else claims with equal solemnity to have discovered that they could all be buried in the State of Pennsylvania! But it would be of little consequence if we could not all find room here, since there must be other provision for us.”

“Why?”

“Certainly there is ‘a place’ in which we are promised that we shall be ‘with Christ,’ this world being yet the great theatre of human life and battle-ground of Satan; no place, certainly, in which to confine a happy soul without prospect of release. The Spiritualistic notion of ‘circles’ of dead friends revolving over us is to me intolerable. I want my husband with me when I need him, but I hope he has a place to be happy in, which is out of this woful world.

“The old astronomical idea, stars around a sun, and systems around a centre, and that centre the Throne of God, is not an unreasonable one. Isaac Taylor, among his various conjectures, inclines, I fancy, to suppose that the sun of each system is the heaven of that system. Though the glory of God may be more directly and impressively exhibited in one place than in another, we may live in different planets, and some of us, after its destruction and renovation, on this same dear old, happy and miserable, loved and maltreated earth. I hope I shall be one of them. I should like to come back and build me a beautiful home in Kansas,—I mean in what was Kansas,—among the happy people and the familiar, transfigured spots where John and I worked for God so long together. That—with my dear Lord to see and speak with every day—would be ‘Heaven our Home.’”

“There will be nodays, then?”

“There will be succession of time. There may not be alternations of twenty-four hours dark or light, but ‘I use with thee an earthly language,’ as the wife said in that beautiful little ‘Awakening,’ of Therrmin’s. Do you remember it? Do read it over, if you haven’t read it lately.

“As to our coming back here, there is an echo to Peter’s assertion, in the idea of a world under a curse, destroyed and regenerated,—the atonement of Christ reaching, with something more than poetic force, the very sands of the earth which he trod with bleeding feet to make himself its Saviour. That makes me feel—don’t you see?—what a taint there is in sin. If dumb dust is to have such awful cleansing, what must be needed for you and me?

“How many pleasant talks we have had about these things, Mary! Well, it cannot be long, at the longest, before we know, even as we are known.”

I looked at her smiling white face,—it is always very white now,—and something struck slowly through me, like a chill.

October 16, midnight.

There is no such thing as sleep at present. Writing is better than thinking.

Aunt Winifred went again to Worcester to-day. She said that she had to buy trimming for Faith’s sack.

She went alone, as usual, and Faith and I kept each other company through the afternoon,—she on the floor with Mary Ann, I in the easy-chair with Macaulay. As the light began to fall level on the floor, I threw the book aside,—being at the end of a volume,—and, Mary Ann having exhausted her attractions, I surrendered unconditionally to the little maiden.

She took me up garret, and down cellar, on lop of the wood-pile, and into the apple-trees; I fathomed the mysteries of Old Man’s Castle and Still Palm; I was her grandmother, I was her baby, I was a rabbit, I was a chestnut horse, I was a watch-dog, I was a mild-tempered giant, I was a bear “warranted not to eat little girls,” I was a roaring hippopotamus and a canary bird, I was Jeff Davis and I was Moses in the bulrushes, and of what I was, the time faileth me to tell.

It comes over me with a curious, mingledsense of the ludicrous and the horrible, that I should have spent the afternoon like a baby and almost as happily, laughing out with the child, past and future forgotten, the tremendous risks of “I spy” absorbing all my present; while what was happening was happening, and what was to come was coming. Not an echo in the air, not a prophecy in the sunshine, not a note of warning in the song of the robins that watched me from the apple-boughs!

As the long, golden afternoon slid away, we came out by the front gate to watch for the child’s mother. I was tired, and, lying back on the grass, gave Faith some pink and purple larkspurs, that she might amuse herself in making a chain of them. The picture that she made sitting there on the short, dying grass—the light which broke all about her and over her at the first, creeping slowly down and away to the west, her little fingers linking the rich, bright flowers tube into tube, the dimple on her cheek and the love in her eyes—has photographed itself into my thinking.

How her voice rang out, when the wheels sounded at last, and the carriage, somewhat slowly driven, stopped!

“Mamma, mamma! see what I’ve got for you, mamma!”

Auntie tried to step from the carriage, and called me: “Mary, can you help me a little? I am—tired.”

I went to her, and she leaned heavily on my arm, and we came up the path.

“Such a pretty little chain, all for you, mamma,” began Faith, and stopped, struck by her mother’s look.

“It has been a long ride, and I am in pain. I believe I will lie right down on the parlor sofa. Mary, would you be kind enough to give Faith her supper and put her to bed?”

Faith’s lip grieved.

“Cousin Mary isn’tyou, mamma. I want to be kissed. You haven’t kissed me.”

Her mother hesitated for a moment; then kissed her once, twice; put both arms about her neck; and turned her face to the wall without a word.

“Mamma is tired, dear,” I said; “come away.”

She was lying quite still when I had done what was to be done for the child, and had come back. The room was nearly dark. I sat down on my cricket by her sofa.

“Shall Phœbe light the lamp?”

“Not just yet.”

“Can’t you drink a cup of tea if I bring it?”

“Not just yet.”

“Did you find the sack-trimming?” I ventured, after a pause.

“I believe so,—yes.”

She drew a little package from her pocket, held it a moment, then let it roll to the floor forgotten. When I picked it up, the soft, tissue-paper wrapper was wet and hot with tears.

“Mary?”

“Yes.”

“I never thought of the little trimming till the last minute. I had another errand.”

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