of
supplication intermingled with information to the Lord of the state
of things on the earth, and the needs of his people. Maria wondered
why, when God knew everything, Leon Barber told him about it, and she
also hoped that God heard better than most of the congregation did.
But she looked with a timid wonder of admiration at the young man
himself. He was so much older than she, that her romantic fancies,
which even at such an early age had seized upon her, never included
him. She as yet dreamed only of other dreamers like herself,
Wollaston Lee, for instance, who went to the same school, and was
only a year older. Maria had made sure that he was there, by a
glance, directly after she had entered, then she never glanced at him
again, but she wove him into her dreams along with the sweetness of
the midsummer night, and the morally tuneful atmosphere of the place.
She was utterly innocent, her farthest dreams were white, but she
dreamed. She gazed out of the window through which came the wind on
her little golden-cropped head (she wore her hair short) in cool
puffs, and she saw great, plumy masses of shadow, themselves like the
substance of which dreams were made. The trees grew thickly down the
slope, which the church crowned, and at the bottom of the slope
rushed the river, which she heard like a refrain through the
intermittent soughing of the trees. A whippoorwill was singing
somewhere out there, and the katydids shrieked so high that they
almost surmounted dreams. She could smell wild grapes and pine and
other mingled odors of unknown herbs, and the earth itself. There had
been a hard shower that afternoon, and the earth still seemed to cry
out with pleasure because of it. Maria had worn her old shoes to
church, lest she spoil her best ones; but she wore her pretty pink
gingham gown, and her hat with a wreath of rosebuds, and she felt to
the utmost the attractiveness of her appearance. She, however, felt
somewhat conscience-stricken on account of the pink gingham gown. It
was a new one, and her mother had been obliged to have it made by a
dress-maker, and had paid three dollars for that, beside the
trimmings, which were lace and ribbon. Maria wore the gown without
her mother's knowledge. She had in fact stolen down the backstairs on
that account, and gone out the south door in order that her mother
should not see her. Maria's mother was ill lately, and had not been
able to go to church, nor even to perform her usua