“’Tain’t near as lonesome, when you can hear the sound of a voice—if it is only your own,” she apologized, when rebuked for the practice by her friend Mrs. Maria Dodge. “Mebbe it does sound kind of crazy— You say lunatics does it constant—but, I don’t know, Maria, I’ve a kind of a notion there’s them that hears, even if you can’t see ’em. And mebbe they answer, too—in your thought-ear.” “You want to be careful, Abby,” warned Mrs. Dodge, shaking her head. “It makes the chills go up and down my back to hear you talk like that; and they don’t allow no such doctrines in the church.” “The Apostle Paul allowed ’em,” Mrs. Daggett pointed out, “so did the Psalmist. You read your Bible, Maria, with that in mind, and you’ll see.” In the spacious, sunlighted chamber of her soul, devoted to the memory of her two daughters who had died in early childhood, Mrs. Daggett sometimes permitted herself to picture Nellie and Minnie, grown to angelic girlhood, and keeping her company about her lonely household tasks in the intervals not necessarily devoted to harp playing in the Celestial City. She laughed softly to herself as she filled two pies with sliced sour apples and dusted them plentifully with spice and sugar. “I’d admire to see papa argufying with that sweet girl,” she observed to the surrounding silence. “Papa certainly is set on having his own way. Guess bin’ alone here with me so constant, he’s got kind of willful. But it don’t bother me any; ain’t that lucky?” She hurried her completed pies into the oven with a swiftness of movement she had never lost, her sweet, thin soprano soaring high in the words of a winding old hymn tune: Lord, how we grovel here below, Fond of these trifling toys; Our souls can neither rise nor go To taste supernal joys! ... It was nearly two o’clock before the big brown horse, indignant at the unwonted invasion of his afternoon leisure, stepped slowly out from the Daggett barn. On the seat of the old-fashioned vehicle, to which he had been attached by Mrs. Daggett’s skillful hands, that lady herself sat placidly erect, arrayed in her blue and white striped muslin. Mrs. Daggett conscientiously wore stripes at all seasons of the year: she had read somewhere that stripes impart to the most rotund of figures an appearance of slimness totally at variance with the facts. As for blue and white, her favorite combination of stripes, any fabric in those colors looked cool and clean; and there was a vague strain of poetry in Mrs. Daggett’s nature which made her lift her eyes to a blue sky filled with floating white clouds with a sense of rapturous satisfaction wholly unrelated to the state of the weather. “G’long, Dolly!” she bade the reluctant animal, with a gentle slap of leathern reins over a rotund back. “Git-ap!”