es food for the use of His creatures,
it is to His honour and glory to serve it handsomely, so far as may be;
and I see little religion in a slovenly piece of meat, or a shapeless
hunch of butter on a dingy plate.

My mother having this gift of grace, it was not strange that the
neighbours often called on her for some service of making beautiful. At
a wedding or a merrymaking of any kind she would be sent for, and the
neighbours, who were plain people, thought her gift more than natural.
People still speak of her in all that part of the country, though she
has been dead sixty odd years, little Mother Marie. She would have liked
to make the meeting-house beautiful each Sabbath with flowers, but this
my father could not hear of, and she never urged it after the first
time. At a funeral, too, she must arrange the white blossoms, and lay
the pale hands together. Abby Rock has told me many stories of the
comfort she brought to sorrowing homes, with her sweet, light, quiet
ways. Abby loved her as her own child.

As I grew older, my mother taught me the violin. I learned eagerly. I
need not say much about that, Melody; my best playing has been for you,
and you know all I could tell you; I learned, and it became the breath
of life to me. My lessons were in the morning always, so that my father
might not hear the sound; but this was not because he did not love the
violin. Far otherwise! In the long winter evenings my mother Marie would
play for him, after I was tucked up in my trundle-bed; music of
religious quality, which stirred his deep, silent nature strongly. She
had learned all the psalm-tunes that he loved, stern old Huguenot
melodies, many of them, that had come over from France with his
ancestor, and been sung down through the generations since. And with
these she played soft, tender airs,--I never knew what they were, but
they could wile the heart out of one's breast. I sometimes would lift my
head from my pillow, and look through the open door at the warm, light
kitchen beyond (for my mother Marie could not bear to shut me into the
cold, dark little bedroom; my door stood open all night, and if I woke
in the night, the coals would always wink me a friendly greeting, and I
could hear the cat purring on her cushion). I would look, I say, through
the open door. There would my mother stand, with the light, swaying way
she had, like a flower or a young white birch in the wind; her cheek
resting on the violin, her eyelids