ere risen there 'in the midst of them.'"

Rulledge looked round on the rest of us, with an air of acquiring merit
from the Bostonian's poetry, but Minver's gravity was proof against the
chance of mocking Rulledge, and I think we all felt alike. Wanhope
seemed especially interested, though he said nothing.

"When I went home I told my wife about it as well as I could, but,
though she entered into the spirit of it, she was rather preoccupied.
The children had all wakened, as they did sometimes, in a body, and were
storming joyfully around the rooms, as if it were Christmas; and she was
trying to get them dressed. 'Do tell them what Easter is like; they've
never seen it kept before,' she said; and I tried to do so, while I took
a hand, as a young father will, and tried to get them into their
clothes. I don't think I dwelt much on the religious observance of the
day, but I dug up some of my profane associations with it in early life,
and told them about coloring eggs, and fighting them, and all that;
there in New England, in those days, they had never seen or heard of
such a thing as an Easter egg.

"I don't think my reminiscences quieted them much. They were all on
fire--the oldest hoy and girl, and the twins, and even the two-year-old
that we called the baby--to go out and buy some eggs and get the
landlord to let them color them in the hotel kitchen. I had a deal of
ado to make them wait till after breakfast, but I managed, somehow; and
when we had finished--it was a mighty good Pennsylvania breakfast, such
as we could eat with impunity in those halcyon days: rich coffee, steak,
sausage, eggs, applebutter, buckwheat cakes and maple syrup--we got
their out-door togs on them, while they were all stamping and shouting
round and had to be caught and overcoated, and fur-capped and hooded
simultaneously, and managed to get them into the street together. Ever
been in Bethlehem?"

We all had to own our neglect of this piece of travel; and Newton, after
a moment of silent forgiveness, said:

"Well, I don't know how it is now, but twenty-five or thirty years ago
it was the most interesting town in America. It wasn't the old Moravian
community that it had been twenty-five years before that, when none but
Moravians could buy property there; but it was like the Sun Hotel, and
just as that had grown round and over the old Sun Inn, the prosperous
manufacturing town, with its iron-foundries and zinc-foundries, and all
the rest of i