of
sacrifice, and been permitted to let fall the knife upon his victim. His
life must have been a dream, an illusion; he only wanted awakening to
existence. And the memory of my Sabbath-morning's vision dwelt with me,
and the voice that speaketh, filling the soul "as a sea-shell is with
murmuring," said, "Your finger will awaken him." And I looked down at
my two passive hands, and asked, "Which one of them?" And the murmuring
voice startled me with the answer, "Two are required,--one of
reconciliation, the other of forgiveness." Whereupon I lifted up the ten
that Nature gave, and said, "Take them all, if need be."----

"Tea is ready," said Aaron, peeping in, his face alive with satisfied
muscles, playing too merry a tune of joy, I thought, for a grave
minister.

"Sophie's a magician," I thought for the thousandth time, as, for the
millionth, Aaron looked at her sitting so demurely regal at his spread
table.

"What would these two good people say," I asked myself, in thinking,
"if they knew all that I have learned in my visit, not yet a week
long?"--and I ran up and down in the scale of semibreves and minims that
I had heard, with the one long, sweet trill transfusing life on earth
into heavenly existence, and I felt very wingy, very much as if I could
take up the tower, standing high and square out there, and carry it,
"like Loretto's chapel, through the air to the green land," where my
spirit would go singing evermore. I could not tell what my joy was like:
not unto anything that I had seen upon the earth; under the earth I had
not yet been; only once above it, and they were calmly celestial there.
I was turbulently joyous, and so I winged a little while around Sophie
and Aaron, hummed a good-night in Chloe's ears, and found that the canny
soul was luxuriating in the idea that the icy lady was to be thawed into
the acceptance of sundry confections which she was basketing to carry
with her when I went out.

"Call me early," I said; "you know I leave at seven o'clock."

"I shall be up ever so early, Miss Anna; never fear for Chloe's sleeping
late to-morrow in the morning; you get ever so much,--'nuff for Chloe
and you too; good-night, honey!"--and Chloe went on her mission, whilst
Aloes and Honey went up-stairs, past Aaron's study, and into a room
where the mysterious art of packing must be practised for a little.

I thought of the "breadths of silver and skirts of gold" that I had seen
the Day pack away; and, in