ad told me that the minister ever did or thought
anything that was wrong, I should have felt as if the foundations of
the earth under me were shaken. I wondered if he ever did laugh.
Perhaps it was wicked for a minister even to smile.

One day, when I was very little, I met the minister in the street; and
he, probably recognizing me as the child of one of his parishioners,
actually bowed to me! His bows were always ministerially profound, and
I was so overwhelmed with surprise and awe that I forgot to make the
proper response of a "curtsey," but ran home as fast as I could go to
proclaim the wonder. It would not have astonished me any more, if one
of the tall Lombardy poplars that stood along the sidewalk had laid
itself down at my feet.

I do not remember anything that the preacher ever said, except some
words which I thought sounded well,--such as "dispensations,"
"decrees," "ordinances," "covenants,"--although I attached no meaning
to them. He seemed to be trying to explain the Bible by putting it into
long words. I did not understand them at all. It was from Aunt Hannah
that I received my first real glimpses of the beautiful New Testament
revelation. In her unconscious wisdom she chose for me passages and
chapters that were like openings into heaven. They contained the great,
deep truths which are simple because they are great. It was not
explanations of those grand words that I required, or that anybody
requires. In reading them we are all children together, and need only
to be led to the banks of the river of God, which is full of water,
that we may look down into its pellucid depths for ourselves.

Our minister was not unlike other ministers of the time, and his
seeming distance from his congregation was doubtless owing to the deep
reverence in which the ministerial office was universally held among
our predecessors. My own graven-image worship of him was only a
childish exaggeration of the general feeling of grown people around me.
He seemed to us an inhabitant of a Sabbath-day sphere, while we
belonged to the every-day world. I distinctly remember the day of my
christening, when I was between three and four years old. My parents
did not make a public profession of their faith until after the birth
of all their children, eight of whom--I being my father's ninth child
and seventh daughter--were baptized at one time. My two half-sisters
were then grown-up young women. My mother had told us that the minister
wou