d Miss
Ross painted me sitting by the mill-wheel while she talked to me of
foreign countries!

The other day Miss Maxwell read something from Browning's poems to the
girls of her literature class. It was about David the shepherd boy
who used to lie in his hollow watching one eagle "wheeling slow as in
sleep." He used to wonder about the wide world that the eagle beheld,
the eagle that was stretching his wings so far up in the blue, while he,
the poor shepherd boy, could see only the "strip twixt the hill and the
sky;" for he lay in a hollow.

I told Mr. Baxter about it the next day, which was the Saturday before
I joined the church. I asked him if it was wicked to long to see as much
as the eagle saw?

There was never anybody quite like Mr. Baxter. "Rebecca dear," he said,
"it may be that you need not always lie in a hollow, as the shepherd boy
did; but wherever you lie, that little strip you see 'twixt the hill
and the sky' is able to hold all of earth and all of heaven, if only you
have the right sort of vision."

I was a long, long time about "experiencing religion." I remember Sunday
afternoons at the brick house the first winter after I went there; when
I used to sit in the middle of the dining-room as I was bid, silent and
still, with the big family Bible on my knees. Aunt Miranda had Baxter's
"Saints' Rest," but her seat was by the window, and she at least could
give a glance into the street now and then without being positively
wicked.

Aunt Jane used to read the "Pilgrim's Progress." The fire burned low;
the tall clock ticked, ticked, so slowly and steadily, that the pictures
swam before my eyes and I almost fell asleep.

They thought by shutting everything else out that I should see God;
but I didn't, not once. I was so homesick for Sunnybook and John that
I could hardly learn my weekly hymns, especially the sad, long one
beginning:

"My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead."

It was brother John for whom I was chiefly homesick on Sunday
afternoons, because at Sunnybrook Farm father was dead and mother was
always busy, and Hannah never liked to talk.

Then the next year the missionaries from Syria came to Riverboro; and
at the meeting Mr. Burch saw me playing the melodeon, and thought I was
grown up and a church member, and so he asked me to lead in prayer.

I didn't dare to refuse, and when I prayed, which was just like thinking
out loud, I found I could talk to God