iry
gives to mortals, this breaking up of roses and dolls and joys, to find
what is in them!

I was pleased to have Chloe come in, to take charge of me. I had gone a
little way beyond my own proper realm, and it was grateful to feel my
centrifugal tendencies overcome by this sable centripetency of force,
that took off my strange habitings,--only the paraphernalia of headache
to her. Pillowing the head supposed to be tormented with pain, Chloe
went about to remedy the evil by drowning it in lavender-water. I let
her think what she pleased, and bravely lifted up the mount of my head,
like Ararat of old unto the great deluge; but she would not let me talk
as I pleased. Chloe was half a century old, with a warm, affectionate,
red heart under her black seeming; and it pulsated around me now, as I
lay there, under her care, in absolute quiet, hushed to content by her
humming ways and words.

The second hymn of the church-service was sending its voice of worship
up unto the Lord of all the earth, and Chloe and I, two of the children
of that Lord, upon His earth, were awed by it. "The neighbor's boy must
have left a window open," I thought. The fruitage of song blossomed on,
the petalled notes withered and fell, and Chloe garnered in her harvest
from the field, with a quaintly expressed regret that she "wasn't in the
meadows of the land of Canaan, where taller songs were growing."

"Never mind, Chloe," I said; "the hymns of earth are very sweet; you can
wait a little longer, can't you?"

"Don't you talk, child; you'll make your head ache again. Yes, old Chloe
is willing to wait; there's honey and sugar left on the ground for her
to find, only she's old now, she can't _stoop to pick it up_ as well as
she could once."

"What do you mean, Chloe?"

"Didn't I tell ye you mustn't talk, Miss Anna? Don't be trying to
trouble yourself with old Chloe's meanings: they haven't any
understanding in them for other people to find out."

"Why not, Chloe?"

"Thee's talking again, Miss Anna. It's the Lord's thoughts that are
given to black Chloe, and she hasn't anything to dress them up in but
her own, poor, old, ragged words, that a'n't fit to use any way; so
Chloe'll wait until she gets something better to make 'em 'pear to
belong to the Lord that owns 'em"; and Chloe still soothingly bathed my
head, which I think was aching all the while, only I should not have
found it out, if she had not told me it.

"I want to ask you a questio