imagination with solemn reaches beyond my childish
ken, was at the close of the day, when--I having been undressed, with
many a cradle lecture and many a blessing, many an admonition and
endearment, line upon line and precept upon precept, here a text and
there a pious rhyme, between the buttons and the strings, and having
said my awful "Now I lay me," lest "I should die before I wake," and
been tucked in with careful fondling fingers, the party of the first
part honorably contracting to "shut his eyes and go straight to sleep,"
provided the party of the second part would remain at the bedside till
the last heavy-lingering wink was winked,--that image of her Maker
carved in ebony took up her part in creation's pausing chorus, and
poured her little human praise into the echoing ear of God in such a
burst of triumphant humility, of exulting hope and trust, and
all-embracing charity and love,--wherein master and mistress and
fellow-servant, friend and stranger, the kind and the cruel, the just
and the unjust, the believer and the scoffer, had each his welcome place
and was called by his name,--as only Ruth could have said or Isaiah
sung. As for me, I only lay there with closed eyes, very still, lest I
should offend the angels, for I knew the room was full of them,--as for
me, I only write here with a faltering heart, lest I should offend those
prayers, for I know heaven is full of them, and I know that for every
time my name arose to the throne of God on that beatified handmaid's
hopes and cries, I have been forgiven seventy times seven.

And so Aunt Judy prayed and praised, sitting upon the landing to rest
herself, as she descended from the garret side-wise, the same foot
always advanced, as is the way of weak old folks in coming down stairs;
and so she prayed and praised between the splitting spells of her forty
years' asthmatic cough, rocking backward and forward, with her hands
upon her knees. And sometimes she preached to me, the ironing-table
being her pulpit; for oh! she was an excellent divine, that had the
Bible at her fingers' ends, and many a moving sermon did she deliver,
"how God doth make his enemies his friends." And sometimes she baptized
me, the bath-tub being her Jordan, in the name of duty, love, and
patience. In truth, Aunt Judy took as much prophylactic pains with my
soul as if it had been tainted with a congenital sulphuric diathesis;
and if I had sunk under a complication of profane disorders, no
pos