pon it; bright with immortal youth, yet matronly and
motherly; and endowed with a queenly dignity, but infinitely tender, as
the highest and deepest attribute of her divinity.

"Ah," thought Hilda to herself, "why should not there be a woman to
listen to the prayers of women? A mother in heaven for all motherless
girls like me? In all God's thought and care for us, can he have
withheld this boon, which our weakness so much needs?"

Oftener than to the other churches, she wandered into St. Peter's.
Within its vast limits, she thought, and beneath the sweep of its great
dome, there should be space for all forms of Christian truth; room both
for the faithful and the heretic to kneel; due help for every creature's
spiritual want.

Hilda had not always been adequately impressed by the grandeur of this
mighty cathedral. When she first lifted the heavy leathern curtain, at
one of the doors, a shadowy edifice in her imagination had been dazzled
out of sight by the reality. Her preconception of St. Peter's was a
structure of no definite outline, misty in its architecture, dim
and gray and huge, stretching into an interminable perspective, and
overarched by a dome like the cloudy firmament. Beneath that vast
breadth and height, as she had fancied them, the personal man might
feel his littleness, and the soul triumph in its immensity. So, in
her earlier visits, when the compassed splendor Of the actual interior
glowed before her eyes, she had profanely called it a great prettiness;
a gay piece of cabinet work, on a Titanic scale; a jewel casket,
marvellously magnified.

This latter image best pleased her fancy; a casket, all inlaid in the
inside with precious stones of various hue, so that there Should not be
a hair's-breadth of the small interior unadorned with its resplendent
gem. Then, conceive this minute wonder of a mosaic box, increased to
the magnitude of a cathedral, without losing the intense lustre of its
littleness, but all its petty glory striving to be sublime. The magic
transformation from the minute to the vast has not been so cunningly
effected but that the rich adornment still counteracts the impression of
space and loftiness. The spectator is more sensible of its limits than
of its extent.

Until after many visits, Hilda continued to mourn for that dim,
illimitable interior, which with her eyes shut she had seen from
childhood, but which vanished at her first glimpse through the actual
door. Her childish vi