"Herein Christ spoke, not to a cla.s.s, only, but to the world! A world of souls, wrestling with the poverty of life!

"In that whole a.s.semblage--that great concourse--that had thronged from cities and villages to hear His words upon the mountainside--was there, think you, _one satisfied nature_?

"Friends--are _ye_ satisfied?

"Or, does every life come to know, at first or at last, how something--a hope, or a possibility, or the fulfillment of a purpose--has got dropped out of it, or has even never entered, so that an emptiness yawns, craving, therein, forever?

"How many souls hunger till they are past their appet.i.te! Go on--down through the years--needy and waiting, and never find or grasp that which a sure instinct tells them they were made for?

"This, this is the poverty of life! These are the poor, to whom G.o.d's Gospel was preached in Christ! And to these denied and waiting ones the first words of Christ's preaching--as I read them--were spoken in blessing.

"Because, elsewhere, he blesses the meek; elsewhere and presently, he tells us how the lowly in spirit shall inherit the earth; so, when I open to this, his earliest uttered benediction upon our race, I read it with an interpretation that includes all humanity:

"'Blessed, in spirit, are the poor. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'

"What is this Kingdom of Heaven? 'It is within you.' It is that which you hold, and live in spiritually; the _real_, of which all earthly, outward being and having are but the show. It is the region wherein little children 'do always behold the Face of my Father which is in Heaven.' It is where we are when we shut our eyes and pray in the words that Christ taught us.

"What matters, then, where your feet stand, or wherewith your hands are busy? So that it is the spot where G.o.d has put you, and the work He has given you to do? Your real life is within--hid in G.o.d with Christ--ripening, and strengthening, and waiting, as through the long, geologic ages of night and incompleteness waited the germs of all that was to unfold into this actual, green, and bounteous earth!

"The narrower your daily round, the wider, maybe, the outreach. Isolated upon a barren mountain peak, you may take in river and lake--forest, field, and valley. A hundred gardens and harvests lift their bloom and fullness to your single eye.

"There is a sunlight that contracts the vision; there is a starlight that enlarges it to take in infinite s.p.a.ce.

"'G.o.d sets some souls in shade, alone.

They have no daylight of their own.

Only in lives of happier ones They see the shine of distant suns.

"'G.o.d knows. Content thee with thy night.

Thy greater heaven hath grander light, To-day is close. The hours are small.

Thou sit'st afar, and hast them all.

"'Lose the less joy that doth but blind; Reach forth a larger bliss to find.

To-day is brief: the inclusive spheres Rain raptures of a thousand years.'"

Faith could not tell what hymn was sung, or what were the words of the prayer that followed the sermon. There was a music and an uplifting in her own soul that made them needless, but for the pause they gave her.

She hardly knew that a notice was read as the people rose before the benediction, when the minister gave out, as requested, that "the Village Dorcas Society would meet on Wednesday of the coming week, at Mrs.

Parley Gimp's."

She was made aware that it had fallen upon her ears, though heard unconsciously, when Serena Gimp caught her by the sleeve in the church porch.

"Ain't it awful," said she, with a simper and a flutter of importance, "to have your name called right out so in the pulpit? I declare, if it hadn't been for seeing the new minister, I wouldn't have come to meeting, I dreaded it so! Ain't he handsome? He's old, though--thirty-five! He's broken-hearted, too! Somebody died, or something else, that he was going to be married to, ever so many years ago; and they say he hasn't hardly spoken to a lady since. That's so romantic! I don't wonder he preaches such low-spirited kind of sermons. Only I wish they warn't quite so. I suppose it's beautiful, and heavenly minded, and all that; but yet I'd rather hear something a little kind of cheerful. Don't you think so? But the poetry was elegant--warn't it? I guess it's original, too. They say he puts things in the _Mishaumok Monthly_. Come Wednesday, won't you? We shall depend, you know."

To Miss Gimp, the one salient point, amidst the solemnities of the day, had been that pulpit notice. She had put new strings to her bonnet for the occasion. Mrs. Gimp, being more immediately and personally affected, had modestly remained away from church.

Glory McWhirk went straight through the village, home; and out to her little room in the sunny side of the low, sloping roof. This was her winter nook. She had a shadier one, looking the other way, for summer.

"I wonder if it's all true!" she cried, silently, in her soul, while she stood for a minute with bonnet and shawl still on, looking out from her little window, dreamily, over the dazzle of the snow, even as her half-blinded thought peered out from its own narrowness into the infinite splendor of the promise of G.o.d--"I wonder if G.o.d will ever make me beautiful! I wonder if I shall ever have a real, great joyfulness, that isn't a make believe!"

Glory called her fancies so. They followed her still. She lived yet in an ideal world. The real world--that is, the best good of it--had not come close enough to her, even in this, her widely amended condition, to displace the other. Remember--this child of eighteen had missed her childhood; had known neither father nor mother, sister nor brother.

Don't think her simple, in the pitiful meaning of the word; but she still enacted, in the midst of her plain, daily life, wonderful dreams that n.o.body could have ever suspected; and here, in her solitary chamber, called up at will creatures of imagination who were to her what human creatures, alas! had never been. Above all, she had a sister here, to whom she told all her secrets. This sister's name was Leonora.

CHAPTER XVII.

FROST-WONDERS.

"No hammers fell, no ponderous axes rung; Like some tall palm, the mystic fabric sprung.

Majestic silence!"

HEBER.

The thaw continued till the snow was nearly gone. Only the great drifts against the fences, and the white folds in the rifts of distant hillsides lingered to tell what had been. Then came a day of warm rain, that washed away the last fragment of earth's cast-off vesture, and bathed her pure for the new adornment that was to be laid upon her. At night, the weather cooled, and the rain changed to a fine, slow mist, congealing as it fell.

Faith stood next morning by a small round table in the sitting-room window, and leaned lovingly over her jonquils and hyacinths that were coming into bloom. Then, drawing the curtain cord to let in the first sunbeam that should slant from the south upon her bulbs, she gave a little cry of rapturous astonishment. It was a diamond morning!

Away off, up the lane, and over the meadows, every tree and bush was hung with twinkling gems that the slight wind swayed against each other with tiny crashes of faint music, and the sun was just touching with a level splendor.

After that first, quick cry, Faith stood mute with ecstasy.

"Mother!" said she, breathlessly, at last, as Mrs. Gartney entered, "look there! have you seen it? Just imagine what the woods must be this morning! How can we think of buckwheats?"

Sounds and odors betrayed that Mis' Battis and breakfast were in the little room adjoining.

"There is a thought of something akin to them, isn't there, under all this splendor? Men must live, and gra.s.s and grain must grow."

Mr. Gartney said this, as he came up behind wife and daughter, and laid a hand on a shoulder of each.

"I know one thing, though," said Faith. "I'll eat the buckwheats, as a vulgar necessity, and then I'll go over the brook and up in the woods behind the Pasture Rocks. It'll last, won't it?"

"Not many hours, with this spring balm in the air," replied her father.

"You must make haste. By noon, it will be all a drizzle."

"Will it be quite safe for her to go alone?" asked Mrs. Gartney.

"I'll ask Aunt Faith to let me have Glory. She showed me the walk last summer. It is fair she should see this, now."

So the morning odds and ends were done up quickly at Cross Corners and at the Old House, and then Faith and Glory set forth together--the latter in as sublime a rapture as could consist with mortal cohesion.