who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow; and those
who cannot afford good linen are too proud to be seen here at all.

"The choir sings and the organ rings," the uninteresting prayers are
rattled off ("O come, let us worship, and fall down: and kneel before the
Lord, our Maker"); a sermon, mostly of the debts of the concern, of the
customs of the ancients, or of the rites and ceremonies of up-to-date
churchism, is delivered, and the play is done, and as I leave the
building a great hunger for a little Christianity fills my heart.

Oh that a preacher might arise and expound from the Book of books a
religion with a God, a religion with a heart in it--a Christian religion,
which would abolish the cold legend whose centre is respectability, and
which rears great buildings in which the rich recline on silken hassocks
while the poor perish in the shadow thereof.

Through the hot dry summer, then the heartless winter and the scorching
summer again which have spent themselves since Gertie's departure, I have
struggled hard to do my duty in that state of life unto which it had
pleased God to call me, and sometimes I have partially succeeded. I have
had no books or papers, nothing but peasant surroundings and peasant
tasks, and have encouraged peasant ignorance--ignorance being the
mainspring of contentment, and contentment the bed-rock of happiness; but
it is all to no purpose. A note from the other world will strike upon the
chord of my being, and the spirit which has been dozing within me awakens
and fiercely beats at its bars, demanding some nobler thought, some
higher aspiration, some wider action, a more saturnalian pleasure,
something more than the peasant life can ever yield. Then I hold my
spirit tight till wild passionate longing sinks down, down to sickening
dumb despair, and had I the privilege extended to job of old--to curse God
and die--I would leap at it eagerly.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

But Absent Friends are Soon Forgot

We received a great many letters from Gertie for a little while after she
went up the country, but they grew shorter and farther between as time
went on.

In one of grannie's letters there was concerning my sister: "I find Gertie
is a much younger girl for her age than Sybylla was, and not nearly so
wild and hard to manage. She is a great comfort to me. Every one remarks
upon her good looks."

From one of Gertie's letters:

Uncle Julius came home from Hong Kong a