ctice
by her friend Mrs. Maria Dodge. "Mebbe it does sound kind of crazy--
You say lunatics does it constant--but, I don't know, Maria, I've a
kind of a notion there's them that hears, even if you can't see 'em.
And mebbe they answer, too--in your thought-ear."

"You want to be careful, Abby," warned Mrs. Dodge, shaking her head.
"It makes the chills go up and down my back to hear you talk like
that; and they don't allow no such doctrines in the church."

"The Apostle Paul allowed 'em," Mrs. Daggett pointed out, "so did the
Psalmist. You read your Bible, Maria, with that in mind, and you'll
see."

In the spacious, sunlighted chamber of her soul, devoted to the
memory of her two daughters who had died in early childhood, Mrs.
Daggett sometimes permitted herself to picture Nellie and Minnie,
grown to angelic girlhood, and keeping her company about her lonely
household tasks in the intervals not necessarily devoted to harp
playing in the Celestial City. She laughed softly to herself as she
filled two pies with sliced sour apples and dusted them plentifully
with spice and sugar.

"I'd admire to see papa argufying with that sweet girl," she observed
to the surrounding silence. "Papa certainly is set on having his own
way. Guess bin' alone here with me so constant, he's got kind of
willful. But it don't bother me any; ain't that lucky?"

She hurried her completed pies into the oven with a swiftness of
movement she had never lost, her sweet, thin soprano soaring high in
the words of a winding old hymn tune:

Lord, how we grovel here below,
Fond of these trifling toys;
Our souls can neither rise nor go
To taste supernal joys! ...

It was nearly two o'clock before the big brown horse, indignant at
the unwonted invasion of his afternoon leisure, stepped slowly out
from the Daggett barn. On the seat of the old-fashioned vehicle, to
which he had been attached by Mrs. Daggett's skillful hands, that
lady herself sat placidly erect, arrayed in her blue and white
striped muslin. Mrs. Daggett conscientiously wore stripes at all
seasons of the year: she had read somewhere that stripes impart to
the most rotund of figures an appearance of slimness totally at
variance with the facts. As for blue and white, her favorite
combination of stripes, any fabric in those colors looked cool and
clean; and there was a vague strain of poetry in Mrs. Daggett's
nature which made her lift her eyes to a blue sky filled with
floating wh