ort-stemmed chrysanthemums in cups and tumblers
here and there through the house, was much more flexible and human than
was natural to her; nor that John, alternating between hope and despair,
was forever humming:

"Set her place at hearth and board
As it used to be:
Higher are the hills of home,
Bluer is the sea!"

It is often so. They who go weeping to look for the dead body of a
sorrow, find a vision of angels where the body has lain.

"I hope Fardie 'll be glad to see us and Ellen will have gingerbread,"
Sue chattered; then, pausing at the window, she added, "I'm sorry to
leave the hills, 'cause I 'specially like them, don't you, Mardie?"

"We are leaving the Shaker hills, but we are going to the hills of
home," her mother answered cheerily. "Don't you remember the Farnham
hills, dear?"

"Yes, I remember," and Sue looked thoughtful; "they were farther off and
covered with woods; these are smooth and gentle. And we shall miss the
lake, Mardie."

"Yes; but we can look at the blue sea from your bedroom window, Sue!"

"And we'll tell Fardie about Polly Reed and the little quail bird, won't
we?"

"Yes; but he and Jack will have a great deal to say to us, and we must
n't talk all the time about the dear, kind Shakers, you know!"

"You're all '_buts_,' Mardie!" at which Susanna smiled through her
tears.

Twilight deepened into dusk, and dusk into dark, and then the moon rose
over the poplar trees outside the window where Susanna and Sue were
sleeping. The Shaker Brethren and Sisters were resting serenely after
their day of confession. It was the aged Tabitha's last Sabbath on
earth, but had she known, it would have made no difference; if ever a
soul was ready for heaven, it was Tabitha's.

There was an Irish family at the foot of the long hill that lay between
the Settlement and the village of Albion; father, mother, and children
had prayed to the Virgin before they went to bed; and the gray-haired
minister in the low-roofed parsonage was writing his communion sermon on
a text sacred to the orthodox Christian world. The same moon shone over
all, and over millions of others worshiping strange idols and holding
strange beliefs in strange far lands, yet none of them owned the whole
of heaven; for as Elder Gray said, "It is a big place and belongs to
God."

Susanna Hathaway went back to John thinking it her plain duty, and to me
it seems beautiful that she found waiting for her at the journey's end a