; then the minister arose and
spread his hands in solemn invocation above the little flock.

"Let us pray."

Every one in the house arose. Even old Mrs. Groesbeck, who had sciatica,
allowed her husband and her son Ebenezer to assist her to her feet, and
the children who were too small to see over the backs of the pews
slipped from their seats and stood in downcast stillness within the high
board inclosures.

After the prayer, Mr. Morrison read the psalm. It was Rouse's version:--

"I joy'd when to the house of God,
Go up, they said to me.
Jerusalem, within thy gates
Our feet shall standing be.

Jerus'lem as a city is
Compactly built together.
Unto that place the tribes go up,
The tribes of God go thither."

The minister read it all and "lined out" the first couplet. Then the
precentor, a tall, thin man, whose thinness was enveloped but not
alleviated by an alpaca coat, struck his tuning-fork more openly and
launched into the highly rarefied atmosphere of "China," being quite
alone in his vocal flight until the congregation joined him in the more
accessible regions of the second line.

Marg'et Ann shared her psalm-book with Laban, who sat beside her. He had
hurt his thumb shelling seed corn, and his mother had made him a clean
thumb-stall for Sabbath. It was with this shrouded member that he held
the edge of the psalm-book awkwardly. Laban's voice was in that
uncertain stage in which its vagaries astonished no one so much as its
owner, but he joined in the singing. "Let all the people praise Thee"
was a command not to be lightly set aside for worldly considerations of
harmony and fitness, and so Laban sang, his callow and ill-adjusted
soul divided between fears that the people would hear him and that the
Lord would not.

Marg'et Ann listened for Lloyd Archer's deep bass voice in the Amen
corner.

She wished his feet _were_ standing within the gates of Jerusalem, as he
so resonantly announced that they would be. But whatever irreverence
there might be in poor Laban refusing to sing what he did not dream of
doubting, there was no impiety to these devout souls in Lloyd Archer's
joining with them in the vocal proclamation of things concerning which
he had very serious doubts.

Not that Jerusalem, either new or old, was one of these things; the
young man himself was not conscious of any heresy there; he believed in
Jerusalem, in the church militant upon earth and triumphant in heaven,
and in m