ded and
soliloquized on his favorite topic, the last golden age of Time, the
Marriage-Supper of the Lamb, when the purified Earth, like a repentant
Psyche, shall be restored to the long-lost favor of a celestial
Bridegroom, and glorified saints and angels shall walk familiarly as
wedding-guests among men.

"Sakes alive!" said little Miss Prissy, after dinner, "did I ever hear
any one go on like that blessed man?--such a spiritual mind! Oh, Miss
Scudder, how you are privileged in having him here! I do really think it
is a shame such a blessed man a'n't thought more of. Why, I could just
sit and hear him talk all day. Miss Scudder, I wish sometimes you'd just
let me make a ruffled shirt for him, and do it all up myself, and put a
stitch in the hem that I learned from my sister Martha, who learned it
from a French young lady who was educated in a convent;--nuns, you know,
poor things, can do _some_ things right; and I think _I_ never saw such
hemstitching as they do there;--and I should like to hemstitch the
Doctor's ruffles; he is _so_ spiritually-minded, it really makes me love
him. Why, hearing him talk put me in mind of a real beautiful song of
Mr. Watts,--I don't know as I could remember the tune."

And Miss Prissy, whose musical talent was one of her special _fortes_,
tuned her voice, a little cracked and quavering, and sang, with a
vigorous accent on each accented syllable,--

"From _the_ third heaven, where God resides,
That holy, happy place,
The New Jerusalem comes down,
Adorned with shining grace.

"Attending angels shout for joy,
And the bright armies sing,--
'Mortals! behold the sacred seat
Of your descending King!'"

"Take care, Miss Scudder!--that silk must be cut exactly on the bias";
and Miss Prissy, hastily finishing her last quaver, caught the silk and
the scissors out of Mrs. Scudder's hand, and fell down at once from
the Millennium into a discourse on her own particular way of covering
piping-cord.

So we go, dear reader,--so long as we have a body and a soul. Two worlds
must mingle,--the great and the little, the solemn and the trivial,
wreathing in and out, like the grotesque carvings on a Gothic
shrine;--only, did we know it rightly, nothing is trivial; since the
human soul, with its awful shadow, makes all things sacred. Have not
ribbons, cast-off flowers, soiled bits of gauze, trivial, trashy
fragments of millinery, sometimes had an awful meaning, a deadly power,