, which eclipsed the
soprano's old green one. I wondered whether she had gone to Boston to
buy it, or had "patronized home industries"--a phrase I had just
discovered with pride in our local paper. The bass was nodding and
letting his hymn book slip toward a fall. I hoped slily that it would
fall, and braced my nerves for the crash. But he woke with a funny
jerk, like my jack-in-the-box, just in time to catch it, and began
listening intently to the sermon as if he had been awake all the
while. The soprano smiled at someone in the congregation, whispered to
the tenor, and then sat silent again.

My gaze wandered to the minister's pleasant face, with its great
square-cut gray beard, which always suggested to me--why, I don't
know--one of the minor prophets; and then past him to the gilded cross
that was painted on the apsidal wall behind him. I knew that if I
looked at this cross, with its gilded rays spreading out in all
directions, long enough the rays would begin to melt together and then
to turn 'round and 'round in a kind of dizzy dance. So I looked
steadily, till I had to shake the sleep out of my eyes with a great
effort. Then I fell to speculating on the tablets painted at the left
of the pulpit, to balance the organ. These tablets were encased in a
design that suggested a twin tombstone. On one of them were the words,
"God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit
and in truth," a sentence which had always given me great difficulty.
But this morning I interpreted it at last to my satisfaction. It
meant, I decided, that a man must first die and become a ghost, a
spirit, before he could tell what church he really ought to go to. I
wondered if, in that spirit region, there would be any Methodists.

Directly below the tablets, in a front pew, sat Miss Emily, she of a
bass voice and the "notion" store. Her Paisley shawl was folded
tightly around her broad, bony shoulders, and made the lower half of a
diamond down her back, the pattern exactly in the middle. If the
pattern had not been exactly in the middle I am sure the service would
have stopped automatically, till it was adjusted. She sat very
straight and looked with partly turned head, showing her masculine
profile, sternly at the minister, as if defying him to be unorthodox.
I tried to picture her asking _him_, as he entered her shop, "Which
side, old man?" Would she dare, I wondered? And what would he reply? A
few pews behind Miss Emily