the Lord will help me to the right words when the time comes. I leave
His blessing with you, boy!" And she turned and left him with his
softened eyes looking up into her calm face.

Then for a long hour Mother Mayberry worked quietly among her dependent
feather folk and as she worked, her gentle face had its brooding
mother-look and her lips moved as she comforted and fortified herself
with snatches of prayer for the journey through the deep waters, on
which she was to lead this child of her affection. After the last
tangle had been straightened out, each brood settled in comfortable
quarters and the cause of all quarrels arbitrated, she walked to the
front gate and stood looking down the Road.

And up from the Deacon's house came a little procession that made her
smile with a sob clutching at her heart. The singer lady had taken
Teether from the arms of his mother, who stood happily exchanging the
topics of the times with the Hoover bride, who had not had thus far
sufficient opportunity to expatiate on quite all the adventures of the
wedding journey and kept on hand still a small store of happenings to
recount to her sympathetic neighbors as they found time and
opportunity. The rosy rollicking youngster she had perched on her
shoulder and held him steadily thus exalted by his pair of sturdy,
milk-fed legs. Martin Luther, as usual, clung to her skirts, Susie Pike
danced on before her and the Deacon was walking slowly along at her
side, carefully carrying the rose-garden of a hat in both his hands. He
was looking up at her with his gentle face abeam with pleasure and
Mother Mayberry could hear, as they came near, that she was humming to
him as he lined out some quaint, early-church words to her. It was a
never failing source of delight to the old patriarch to have her thus
fit motives from the world's great music to the old, pioneer hymns.

"Sister Mayberry," he exclaimed with exultation in his old face, "I
never thought to hear in this world these words of my brother, Charles
Wesley, sung to such heavenly strains as my young sister has put them
this day. Never before, I feel, have they had fit rendition. While I
line the verse, sing them again to Sister Mayberry, child, that her
ears may be rejoiced with mine." And Mother Mayberry caught at the top
of the gate as the girl slipped the nodding baby down into her arms and
in her wonderful muted voice hummed the Grail motif while the Deacon
raised his thin old hands and l