ll the force of her strong young lungs. Helen caught the words as
she drew near:--

"My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead.
What horrors seize the guilty soul,
Upon the dying bed!

"Where endless crowds of sinners lie,
And darkness makes their chains,
Tortured with keen despair they cry,
Yet wait for fiercer pains!"

"Oh, Alfaretta!" her mistress cried, in indignant astonishment. "How can
you say such terrible words!" Alfaretta stood still, in open-mouthed
amazement, an injured look in her good-natured blue eyes. The incongruity
of this rosy-faced, happy girl, standing in the sunshine, with all the
scents and sounds of a July day about her, and singing in her cheerful
voice these hopeless words, almost made Helen smile; but she added
gravely, "I hope you will not sing that again. I do not like it."

"But ma'am--but Mrs. Ward," said the girl, plainly hurt at the reproof,
"I was practicing. I belong to the choir."

Alfaretta had dropped the tea-towels, hot with sunshine and smelling of
clover-blossoms, upon her well-scoured dresser, and then turned and
looked at her mistress reproachfully. "I don't know what I am going to do
if I can't practice," she said.

"You don't mean to say you sing that in church?" cried Helen. "Where do
you go?"

"Why, I go to your church," said the still injured Alfaretta,--"to Mr.
Ward's. We're to have that hymn on Sabbath"--

"Oh, there must be some mistake," remonstrated Helen. "I'm sure Mr. Ward
did not notice that verse."

"But it's all like that; it says"--

"Don't tell me any more," Helen said. "I've heard enough. I had no idea
such awful words were written." Then she stopped abruptly, feeling her
position as the preacher's wife in a way of which she had never thought.

Alfaretta's father was an elder in John's church, which gave her a
certain ease in speaking to her mistress that did not mean the slightest
disrespect.

"Is it the words of it you don't like?" said Alfaretta, rather relieved,
since her singing had not been criticised.

"Yes," Helen answered, "it is the words. Don't you see how dreadful they
are?"

Alfaretta stood with her plump red hands on her hips, and regarded Mrs.
Ward with interest. "I hadn't ever thought of 'em," she said. "Yes,
ma'am. I suppose they are awful bad," and swinging back and forth on her
heels, her eyes fixed meditatively on the ceiling, she said,--

"'Then swift and dreadful she d