p; she washed
dishes with confession, ironed shirts with supplication, and dusted
furniture with thanksgiving,--morning, evening, noon, and night,
praising God. From resting-place to resting-place, over tedious
stretches of task, she prayed her way,

"And ever, at each period,
She stopped and sang, 'Praise God!'"

like Browning's Theocrite. And, as if answering Blaise, the listening
monk, when he said,

"Well done!
I doubt not thou art heard, my son:
As well as if thy voice to-day
Were praising God the Pope's great way,"

her longing was,

"Would God that I
Might praise him _some_ great way and die."

Many a time have I, bursting boisterously into my little bedroom in
quest of top or ball, checked myself, with a feeling more akin to
superstition than to reverence, on finding Aunt Judy on her knees beside
the pretty cot she had just made up so snugly and tenderly for me,
pouring her ever-brimming heart out in clear, refreshing springs of
prayer. Led by these still waters, she rested there from the heat and
burden of life, as the camel by wells in the desert. On such occasions I
always knew that my dear old nurse had just finished making a bed or
sweeping a room, and had sunk down to rest in a prayer, as a fagged
drudge on a stool. If you ever gloried--and what gentleman has not?--in
Gregg's brave old hymn, beginning

"Jesus, and shall it ever be,
A mortal man ashamed of thee?"

you would ask for no more intrepid illustration of its loyal spirit than
the figure of Aunt Judy on her knees at the foot of my father's bed,
where he often found her in the act,--turning her face for an instant,
but without offering to rise, from her Divine Master to the mild
fellow-servant in whom she affectionately recognized an earthly master,
and asking, with a manner far less embarrassed than his own, "Was you
lookin' for your gloves, sir? They's on de bureau,--and your umbrell's
behind de door";--and then placidly turning back again to that Master
whom most of us white slaves of the Devil think we have honored enough
when we have printed His title with a capital M.

"My Master, shall I speak? O that to Thee
My Servant were a little so
As flesh may be!
That these two words might creep and grow
To some degree of spiciness to Thee!"

But the hour of my Aunt-Judyness most sacred and inspiring to me,
weirdly filling my