back to him
the story of Mr. Alderman Popkins and the Principessa, and the bandits;
after this came the heights of Albano and Soracte, and there, at last,
the Tiber, the pyramid tomb, the great church dome, the stone pines of
the Janiculan hill,--Rome itself. Reuben was not strong or curious in
his classics; the galleries and the churches took a deeper hold upon him
than the Forum and the ruins. He wandered for hours together under the
arches of St. Peter's. He wished he might have led the Doctor along its
pavement into the very presence of the mysteries of the Scarlet Woman of
Babylon. He wished Miss Almira, with her saffron ribbons, might be
there, sniffing at her little vial of salts, and may be singing treble.
The very meeting-house upon the green, that was so held in reverence,
with its belfry and spire atop, would hardly make a scaffolding from
which to brush the cobwebs from the frieze below the vaulting of this
grandest of temples. Oddly enough, he fancies Deacon Tourtelot, in his
snuff-colored surtout, pacing down the nave with him, and saying,--as he
would be like to say,--"Must ha' been a smart man that built it; but I
guess they don't have better preachin', as a gineral thing, than the old
Doctor gives us on Fast-Days or in 'protracted' meetin's."

Such queer humors and droll comparisons flash into the mind of Reuben,
even under all his sense of awe,--a swift, disorderly mingling of the
themes and offices which kindled his first sense of religious awe under
a home atmosphere with the wondrous forms and splendor which kindle a
new awe now. The great dome enwalling with glittering mosaics a heaven
of its own, and blazing with figured saints, and the golden distich,
"Thou art Peter,--to thee will I give the keys of the kingdom of
heaven,"--all this seems too grand to be untrue. Are not the keys verily
here? Can falsehood build up so august a lie? A couple of friars shuffle
past him, and go to their prayers at some near altar; he does not even
smile at their shaven pates and their dowdy, coarse gowns of serge. Low
music from some far-away chapel comes floating under the panelled
vaultings, and loses itself under the great dome, with a sound so
gentle, so full of entreaty, that it seems to him the dove on the high
altar might have made it with a cooing and a flutter of her white wings.
A mother and two daughters, in black, glide past him, and drop upon
their knees before some saintly shrine, and murmur their than