Loe raamatut: «The Story of Waitstill Baxter», lehekülg 5
X. ON TORY HILL
It had been a heavenly picnic the little trio all agreed as to that; and when Ivory saw the Baxter girls coming up the shady path that led along the river from the Indian Cellar to the bridge, it was a merry group and a transfigured Rodman that caught his eye. The boy, trailing on behind with the baskets and laden with tin dippers and wildflowers, seemed another creature from the big-eyed, quiet little lad he saw every day. He had chattered like a magpie, eaten like a bear, is torn his jacket getting wild columbines for Patty, been nicely darned by Waitstill, and was in a state of hilarity that rendered him quite unrecognizable.
“We’ve had a lovely picnic!” called Patty; “I wish you had been with us!”
“You didn’t ask me!” smiled Ivory, picking up Waitstill’s mending-basket from the nook in the trees where she had hidden it for safe-keeping.
“We’ve played games, Ivory,” cried the boy. “Patty made them up herself. First we had the ‘Landing of the Pilgrims,’ and Waitstill made believe be the figurehead of the Mayflower. She stood on a great boulder and sang:—
‘The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast’—
and, oh! she was splendid! Then Patty was Pocahontas and I was Cap’n John Smith, and look, we are all dressed up for the Indian wedding!”
Waitstill had on a crown of white birch bark and her braid of hair, twined with running ever-green, fell to her waist. Patty was wreathed with columbines and decked with some turkey feathers that she had put in her basket as too pretty to throw away. Waitstill looked rather conscious in her unusual finery, but Patty sported it with the reckless ease and innocent vanity that characterized her.
“I shall have to run into father’s store to put myself tidy,” Waitstill said, “so good-bye, Rodman, we’ll have another picnic some day. Patty, you must do the chores this afternoon, you know, so that I can go to choir rehearsal.”
Rodman and Patty started up the hill gayly with their burdens, and Ivory walked by Waitstill’s side as she pulled off her birch-bark crown and twisted her braid around her head with a heightened color at being watched.
“I’ll say good-bye now, Ivory, but I’ll see you at the meeting-house,” she said, as she neared the store. “I’ll go in here and brush the pine needles off, wash my hands, and rest a little before rehearsal. That’s a puzzling anthem we have for to-morrow.”
“I have my horse here; let me drive you up to the church.”
“I can’t, Ivory, thank you. Father’s orders are against my driving out with any one, you know.”
“Very well, the road is free, at any rate. I’ll hitch my horse down here in the woods somewhere and when you start to walk I shall follow and catch up with you. There’s luckily only one way to reach the church from here, and your father can’t blame us if we both take it!”
And so it fell out that Ivory and Waitstill walked together in the cool of the afternoon to the meeting-house on Tory Hill. Waitstill kept the beaten path on one side and Ivory that on the other, so that the width of the country road, deep in dust, was between them, yet their nearness seemed so tangible a thing that each could feel the heart beating in the other’s side. Their talk was only that of tried friends, a talk interrupted by long beautiful silences; silences that come only to a man and woman whose understanding of each other is beyond question and answer. Not a sound broke the stillness, yet the very air, it seemed to them, was shedding meanings: the flowers were exhaling a love secret with their fragrances, the birds were singing it boldly from the tree-tops, yet no word passed the man’s lips or the girl’s. Patty would have hung out all sorts of signals and lures to draw the truth from Ivory and break through the walls of his self-control, but Waitstill, never; and Ivory Boynton was made of stuff so strong that he would not speak a syllable of love to a woman unless he could say all. He was only five-and-twenty, but he had been reared in a rigorous school, and had learned in its poverty, loneliness, and anxiety lessons of self-denial and self-control that bore daily fruit now. He knew that Deacon Baxter would never allow any engagement to exist between Waitstill and himself; he also knew that Waitstill would never defy and disobey her father if it meant leaving her younger sister to fight alone a dreary battle for which she was not fitted. If there was little hope on her side there seemed even less on his. His mother’s mental illness made her peculiarly dependent upon him, and at the same time held him in such strict bondage that it was almost impossible for him to get on in the world or even to give her the comforts she needed. In villages like Riverboro in those early days there was no putting away, even of men or women so demented as to be something of a menace to the peace of the household; but Lois Boynton was so gentle, so fragile, so exquisite a spirit, that she seemed in her sad aloofness simply a thing to be sheltered and shielded somehow in her difficult life journey. Ivory often thought how sorely she needed a daughter in her affliction. If the baby sister had only lived, the home might have been different; but alas! there was only a son,—a son who tried to be tender and sympathetic, but after all was nothing but a big, clumsy, uncomprehending man-creature, who ought to be felling trees, ploughing, sowing, reaping, or at least studying law, making his own fortune and that of some future wife. Old Mrs. Mason, a garrulous, good-hearted grandame, was their only near neighbor, and her visits always left his mother worse rather than better. How such a girl as Waitstill would pour comfort and beauty and joy into a lonely house like his, if only he were weak enough to call upon her strength and put it to so cruel a test. God help him, he would never do that, especially as he could not earn enough to keep a larger family, bound down as he was by inexorable responsibilities. Waitstill, thus far in life, had suffered many sorrows and enjoyed few pleasures; marriage ought to bring her freedom and plenty, not carking care and poverty. He stole long looks at the girl across the separating space that was so helpless to separate,—feeding his starved heart upon her womanly graces. Her quick, springing step was in harmony with the fire and courage of her mien. There was a line or two in her face,—small wonder; but an “unconquerable soul” shone in her eyes; shone, too, in no uncertain way, but brightly and steadily, expressing an unshaken joy in living. Valiant, splendid, indomitable Waitstill! He could never tell her, alas! but how he gloried in her!
It is needless to say that no woman could be the possessor of such a love as Ivory Boynton’s and not know of its existence. Waitstill never heard a breath of it from Ivory’s lips; even his eyes were under control and confessed nothing; nor did his hand ever clasp hers, to show by a tell-tale touch the truth he dared not utter; nevertheless she felt that she was beloved. She hid the knowledge deep in her heart and covered it softly from every eye but her own; taking it out in the safe darkness sometimes to wonder over and adore in secret. Did her love for Ivory rest partly on a sense of vocation?—a profound, inarticulate divining of his vast need of her? He was so strong, yet so weak because of the yoke he bore, so bitterly alone in his desperate struggle with life, that her heart melted like wax whenever she thought of him. When she contemplated the hidden mutiny in her own heart, she was awestruck sometimes at the almost divine patience of Ivory’s conduct as a son.
“How is your mother this summer, Ivory?” she asked as they sat down on the meeting-house steps waiting for Jed Morrill to open the door. “There is little change in her from year to year, Waitstill.—By the way, why don’t we get out of this afternoon sun and sit in the old graveyard under the trees? We are early and the choir won’t get here for half an hour.—Dr. Perry says that he does not understand mother’s case in the least, and that no one but some great Boston physician could give a proper opinion on it; of course, that is impossible at present.”
They sat down on the grass underneath one of the elms and Waitstill took off her hat and leaned back against the tree-trunk.
“Tell me more,” she said; “it is so long since we talked together quietly and we have never really spoken of your mother.”
“Of course,” Ivory continued, “the people of the village all think and speak of mother’s illness as religious insanity, but to me it seems nothing of the sort. I was only a child when father first fell ill with Jacob Cochrane, but I was twelve when father went away from home on his ‘mission,’ and if there was any one suffering from delusions in our family it was he, not mother. She had altogether given up going to the Cochrane meetings, and I well remember the scene when my father told her of the revelation he had received about going through the state and into New Hampshire in order to convert others and extend the movement. She had no sympathy with his self-imposed mission, you may be sure, though now she goes back in her memory to the earlier days of her married life, when she tried hard, poor soul, to tread the same path that father was treading, so as to be by his side at every turn of the road.
“I am sure” (here Ivory’s tone was somewhat dry and satirical) “that father’s road had many turns, Waitstill! He was a schoolmaster in Saco, you know, when I was born but he soon turned from teaching to preaching, and here my mother followed with entire sympathy, for she was intensely, devoutly religious. I said there was little change in her, but there is one new symptom. She has ceased to refer to her conversion to Cochranism as a blessed experience. Her memory of those first days seems to have faded, As to her sister’s death and all the circumstances of her bringing Rodman home, her mind is a blank. Her expectation of father’s return, on the other hand, is much more intense than ever.”
“She must have loved your father dearly, Ivory, and to lose him in this terrible way is much worse than death. Uncle Bart says he had a great gift of language!”
“Yes, and it was that, in my mind, that led him astray. I fear that the Spirit of God was never so strong in father as the desire to influence people by his oratory. That was what drew him to preaching in the first place, and when he found in Jacob Cochrane a man who could move an audience to frenzy, lift them out of the body, and do with their spirits as he willed, he acknowledged him as master. Whether his gospel was a pure and undefiled religion I doubt, but he certainly was a master of mesmeric control. My mother was beguiled, entranced, even bewitched at first, I doubt not, for she translated all that Cochrane said into her own speech, and regarded him as the prophet of a new era. But Cochrane’s last ‘revelations’ differed from the first, and were of the earth, earthy. My mother’s pure soul must have revolted, but she was not strong enough to drag father from his allegiance. Mother was of better family than father, but they were both well educated and had the best schooling to be had in their day. So far as I can judge, mother always had more ‘balance’ than father, and much better judgment,—yet look at her now!”
“Then you think it was your father’s disappearance that really caused her mind to waver?” asked Waitstill.
“I do, indeed. I don’t know what happened between them in the way of religious differences, nor how much unhappiness these may have caused. I remember she had an illness when we first came here to live and I was a little chap of three or four, but that was caused by the loss of a child, a girl, who lived only a few weeks. She recovered perfectly, and her head was as clear as mine for a year or two after father went away. As his letters grew less frequent, as news of him gradually ceased to come, she became more and more silent, and retired more completely into herself. She never went anywhere, nor entertained visitors, because she did not wish to hear the gossip and speculation that were going on in the village. Some of it was very hard for a wife to bear, and she resented it indignantly; yet never received a word from father with which to refute it. At this time, as nearly as I can judge, she was a recluse, and subject to periods of profound melancholy, but nothing worse. Then she took that winter journey to her sister’s deathbed, brought home the boy, and, hastened by exposure and chill and grief, I suppose, her mind gave way,—that’s all!” And Ivory sighed drearily as he stretched himself on the greensward, and looked off towards the snow-clad New Hampshire hills. “I’ve meant to write the story of the ‘Cochrane craze’ sometime, or such part of it as has to do with my family history, and you shall read it if you like. I should set down my child-hood and my boyhood memories, together with such scraps of village hearsay as seem reliable. You were not so much younger than I, but I was in the thick of the excitement, and naturally I heard more than you, having so bitter a reason for being interested. Jacob Cochrane has altogether disappeared from public view, but there’s many a family in Maine and New Hampshire, yes, and in the far West, that will feel his influence for years to come.”
“I should like very much to read your account. Aunt Abby’s version, for instance, is so different from Uncle Bart’s that one can scarcely find the truth between the two; and father’s bears no relation to that of any of the others.”
“Some of us see facts and others see visions,” replied Ivory, “and these differences of opinion crop up in the village every day when anything noteworthy is discussed. I came upon a quotation in my reading last evening that described it:
‘One said it thundered… another that an angel spake’”
“Do you feel as if your father was dead, Ivory?”
“I can only hope so! That thought brings sadness with it, as one remembers his disappointment and failure, but if he is alive he is a traitor.”
There was a long pause and they could see in the distance Humphrey Barker with his clarionet and Pliny Waterhouse with his bass viol driving up to the churchyard fence to hitch their horses. The sun was dipping low and red behind the Town-House Hill on the other side of the river.
“What makes my father dislike the very mention of yours?” asked Waitstill. “I know what they say: that it is because the two men had high words once in a Cochrane meeting, when father tried to interfere with some of the exercises and was put out of doors. It doesn’t seem as if that grievance, seventeen or eighteen years ago, would influence his opinion of your mother, or of you.”
“It isn’t likely that a man of your father’s sort would forget or forgive what he considered an injury; and in refusing to have anything to do with the son of a disgraced man and a deranged woman, he is well within his rights.”
Ivory’s cheeks burned red under the tan, and his hand trembled a little as he plucked bits of clover from the grass and pulled them to pieces absent-mindedly. “How are you getting on at home these days, Waitstill?” he asked, as if to turn his own mind and hers from a too painful subject.
“You have troubles enough of your own without hearing mine, Ivory, and anyway they are not big afflictions, heavy sorrows, like those you have to bear. Mine are just petty, nagging, sordid, cheap little miseries, like gnat-bites;—so petty and so sordid that I can hardly talk to God about them, much less to a human friend. Patty is my only outlet and I need others, yet I find it almost impossible to escape from the narrowness of my life and be of use to any one else.” The girl’s voice quivered and a single tear-drop on her cheek showed that she was speaking from a full heart. “This afternoon’s talk has determined me in one thing,” she went on. “I am going to see your mother now and then. I shall have to do it secretly, for your sake, for hers, and for my own, but if I am found out, then I will go openly. There must be times when one can break the lower law, and yet keep the higher. Father’s law, in this case, is the lower, and I propose to break it.”
“I can’t have you getting into trouble, Waitstill,” Ivory objected. “You’re the one woman I can think of who might help my mother; all the same, I would not make your life harder; not for worlds!”
“It will not be harder, and even if it was I should ‘count it all joy’ to help a woman bear such sorrow as your mother endures patiently day after day”; and Waitstill rose to her feet and tied on her hat as one who had made up her mind.
It was almost impossible for Ivory to hold his peace then, so full of gratitude was his soul and so great his longing to pour out the feeling that flooded it. He pulled himself together and led the way out of the churchyard. To look at Waitstill again would be to lose his head, but to his troubled heart there came a flood of light, a glory from that lamp that a woman may hold up for a man; a glory that none can take from him, and none can darken; a light by which he may walk and live and die.
XI. A JUNE SUNDAY
IT was a Sunday in June, and almost the whole population of Riverboro and Edgewood was walking or driving in the direction of the meeting-house on Tory Hill.
Church toilettes, you may well believe, were difficult of attainment by Deacon Baxter’s daughters, as they had been by his respective helpmates in years gone by. When Waitstill’s mother first asked her husband to buy her a new dress, and that was two years after marriage, he simply said: “You look well enough; what do you want to waste money on finery for, these hard times? If other folks are extravagant, that ain’t any reason you should be. You ain’t obliged to take your neighbors for an example:—take ‘em for a warnin’!”
“But, Foxwell, my Sunday dress is worn completely to threads,” urged the second Mrs. Baxter.
“That’s what women always say; they’re all alike; no more idea o’ savin’ anything than a skunk-blackbird! I can’t spare any money for gew-gaws, and you might as well understand it first as last. Go up attic and open the hair trunk by the winder; you’ll find plenty there to last you for years to come.”
The second Mrs. Baxter visited the attic as commanded, and in turning over the clothes in the old trunk, knew by instinct that they had belonged to her predecessor in office. Some of the dresses were neat, though terribly worn and faded, but all were fortunately far too short and small for a person of her fine proportions. Besides, her very soul shrank from wearing them, and her spirit revolted both from the insult to herself and to the poor dead woman she had succeeded, so she came downstairs to darn and mend and patch again her shabby wardrobe. Waitstill had gone through the same as her mother before her, but in despair, when she was seventeen, she began to cut over the old garments for herself and Patty. Mercifully there were very few of them, and they had long since been discarded. At eighteen she had learned to dye yarns with yellow oak or maple bark and to make purples from elder and sumac berries; she could spin and knit as well as any old “Aunt” of the village, and cut and shape a garment as deftly as the Edgewood tailoress, but the task of making bricks without straw was a hard one, indeed.
She wore a white cotton frock on this particular Sunday. It was starched and ironed with a beautiful gloss, while a touch of distinction was given to her costume by a little black sleeveless “roundabout” made out of the covering of an old silk umbrella. Her flat hat had a single wreath of coarse daisies around the crown, and her mitts were darned in many places, nevertheless you could not entirely spoil her; God had used a liberal hand in making her, and her father’s parsimony was a sort of boomerang that flew back chiefly upon himself.
As for Patty, her style of beauty, like Cephas Cole’s ell had to be toned down rather than up, to be effective, but circumstances had been cruelly unrelenting in this process of late. Deacon Baxter had given the girls three or four shopworn pieces of faded yellow calico that had been repudiated by the village housewives as not “fast” enough in color to bear the test of proper washing. This had made frocks, aprons, petticoats, and even underclothes, for two full years, and Patty’s weekly objurgations when she removed her everlasting yellow dress from the nail where it hung were not such as should have fallen from the lips of a deacon’s daughter. Waitstill had taken a piece of the same yellow material, starched and ironed it, cut a curving, circular brim from it, sewed in a pleated crown, and lo! a hat for Patty! What inspired Patty to put on a waist ribbon of deepest wine color, with a little band of the same on the pale yellow hat, no one could say.
“Do you think you shall like that dull red right close to the yellow, Patty?” Waitstill asked anxiously.
“It looks all right on the columbines in the Indian Cellar,” replied Patty, turning and twisting the hat on her head. “If we can’t get a peek at the Boston fashions, we must just find our styles where we can!”
The various roads to Tory Hill were alive with vehicles on this bright Sunday morning. Uncle Bart and Abel Day, with their respective wives on the back seat of the Cole’s double wagon, were passed by Deacon Baxter and his daughters, Waitstill being due at meeting earlier than others by reason of her singing in the choir. The Deacon’s one-horse, two-wheeled “shay” could hold three persons, with comfort on its broad seat, and the twenty-year-old mare, although she was always as hollow as a gourd, could generally do the mile, uphill all the way, in half an hour, if urged continually, and the Deacon, be it said, if not good at feeding, was unsurpassed at urging.
Aunt Abby Cole could get only a passing glimpse of Patty in the depths of the “shay,” but a glimpse was always enough for her, as her opinion of the girl’s charms was considerably affected by the forlorn condition of her son Cephas, whom she suspected of being hopelessly in love with the young person aforesaid, to whom she commonly alluded as “that red-headed bag-gage.”
“Patience Baxter’s got the kind of looks that might do well enough at a tavern dance, or a husking, but they’re entirely unsuited to the Sabbath day or the meetin’-house,” so Aunt Abby remarked to Mrs. Day in the way of backseat confidence. “It’s unfortunate that a deacon’s daughter should be afflicted with that bold style of beauty! Her hair’s all but red; in fact, you might as well call it red, when the sun shines on it: but if she’d ever smack it down with bear’s grease she might darken it some; or anyhow she’d make it lay slicker; but it’s the kind of hair that just matches that kind of a girl,—sort of up an’ comin’! Then her skin’s so white and her cheeks so pink and her eyes so snappy that she’d attract attention without half trying though I guess she ain’t above makin’ an effort.”
“She’s innocent as a kitten,” observed Mrs. Day impartially.
“Oh, yes, she’s innocent enough an’ I hope she’ll keep so! Waitstill’s a sight han’somer, if the truth was told; but she’s the sort of girl that’s made for one man and the rest of em never look at her. The other one’s cut out for the crowd, the more the merrier. She’s a kind of man-trap, that girl is!—Do urge the horse a little mite, Bartholomew! It makes me kind o’ hot to be passed by Deacon Baxter. It’s Missionary Sunday, too, when he gen’ally has rheumatism too bad to come out.”
“I wonder if he ever puts anything into the plate,” said Mrs. Day. “No one ever saw him, that I know of.”
“The Deacon keeps the Thou Shalt Not commandments pretty well,” was Aunt Abby’s terse response. “I guess he don’t put nothin’ into the plate, but I s’pose we’d ought to be thankful he don’t take nothin’ out. The Baptists are gettin’ ahead faster than they’d ought to, up to the Mills. Our minister ain’t no kind of a proselyter, Seems as if he didn’t care how folks got to heaven so long as they got there! The other church is havin’ a service this afternoon side o’ the river, an’ I’d kind o’ like to go, except it would please ‘em too much to have a crowd there to see the immersion. They tell me, but I don’t know how true, that that Tillman widder woman that come here from somewheres in Vermont wanted to be baptized to-day, but the other converts declared THEY wouldn’t be, if she was!”
“Jed Morrill said they’d have to hold her under water quite a spell to do any good,” chuckled Uncle Bart from the front seat.
“Well, I wouldn’t repeat it, Bartholomew, on the Sabbath day; not if he did say it. Jed Morrill’s responsible for more blasphemious jokes than any man in Edgewood. I don’t approve of makin’ light of anybody’s religious observances if they’re ever so foolish,” said Aunt Abby somewhat enigmatically. “Our minister keeps remindin’ us that the Baptists and Methodists are our brethren, but I wish he’d be a little more anxious to have our S’ceity keep ahead of the others.”
“Jed’s ‘bout right in sizin’ up the Widder Tillman,” was Mr. Day’s timid contribution to the argument. “I ain’t a readin’ man, but from what folks report I should think she was one o’ them critters that set on rocks bewilderin’ an’ bedevilin’ men-folks out o’ their senses—SYREENS, I think they call ‘em; a reg’lar SYREEN is what that woman is, I guess!”
“There, there, Abel, you wouldn’t know a syreen if you found one in your baked beans, so don’t take away a woman’s character on hearsay.” And Mrs. Day, having shut up her husband as was her bounden duty as a wife and a Christian, tied her bonnet strings a little tighter and looked distinctly pleased with herself.
“Abel ain’t startin’ any new gossip,” was Aunt Abby’s opinion, as she sprung to his rescue. “One or two more holes in a colander don’t make much dif’rence.—Bartholomew, we’re certainly goin’ to be late this mornin’; we’re about the last team on the road”; and Aunt Abby glanced nervously behind. “Elder Boone ain’t begun the openin’ prayer, though, or we should know it. You can hear him pray a mile away, when the wind’s right. I do hate to be late to meetin’. The Elder allers takes notice; the folks in the wing pews allers gapes an’ stares, and the choir peeks through the curtain, takin’ notes of everything you’ve got on your back. I hope to the land they’ll chord and keep together a little mite better ‘n they’ve done lately, that’s all I can say! If the Lord is right in our midst as the Bible says, He can’t think much of our singers this summer!”
“They’re improvin’, now that Pliny Waterhouse plays his fiddle,” Mrs. Day remarked pacifically. “There was times in the anthem when they kept together consid’able well last Sunday. They didn’t always chord, but there, they chorded some!—we’re most there now, Abby, don’t fret! Cephas won’t ring the last bell till he knows his own folks is crossin’ the Common!”
Those were days of conscientious church-going and every pew in the house was crowded. The pulpit was built on pillars that raised it six feet higher than the floor; the top was cushioned and covered with red velvet surmounted by a huge gilt-edged Bible. There was a window in the tower through which Cephas Cole could look into the church, and while tolling the bell could keep watch for the minister. Always exactly on time, he would come in, walk slowly up the right-hand aisle, mount the pulpit stairs, enter and close the door after him. Then Cephas would give one tremendous pull to warn loiterers on the steps; a pull that meant, “Parson’s in the pulpit!” and was acted upon accordingly. Opening the big Bible, the minister raised his right hand impressively, and saying, “Let us pray,” the whole congregation rose in their pews with a great rustling and bowed their heads devoutly for the invocation.
Next came the hymn, generally at that day one of Isaac Watts’s. The singers, fifteen or twenty in number, sat in a raised gallery opposite the pulpit, and there was a rod in front hung with red curtains to hide them when sitting down. Any one was free to join, which perhaps accounted for Aunt Abby’s strictures as to time and tune. Jed Morrill, “blasphemious” as he was considered by that acrimonious lady, was the leader, and a good one, too. There would be a great whispering and buzzing when Deacon Sumner with his big fiddle and Pliny Waterhouse with his smaller one would try to get in accord with Humphrey Baker and his clarionet. All went well when Humphrey was there to give the sure key-note, but in his absence Jed Morrill would use his tuning-fork. When the key was finally secured by all concerned, Jed would raise his stick, beat one measure to set the time, and all joined in, or fell in, according to their several abilities. It was not always a perfect thing in the way of a start, but they were well together at the end of the first line, and when, as now, the choir numbered a goodly number of voices, and there were three or four hundred in the pews, nothing more inspiring in its peculiar way was ever heard, than the congregational singing of such splendid hymns as “Old Hundred,” “Duke Street,” or “Coronation.”
Waitstill led the trebles, and Ivory was at the far end of the choir in the basses, but each was conscious of the other’s presence. This morning he could hear her noble voice rising a little above, or, perhaps from its quality, separating itself somehow, ever so little, from the others. How full of strength and hope it was, her voice! How steadfast to the pitch; how golden its color; how moving in its crescendos! How the words flowed from her lips; not as if they had been written years ago, but as if they were the expression of her own faith. There were many in the congregation who were stirred, they knew not why, when there chanced to be only a few “carrying the air” and they could really hear Waitstill Baxter singing some dear old hymn, full of sacred memories, like:—
