She could not endure, and I, taught to see through her eyes, cannot endure either, the chilly blend of whitewash and painted deal pews in the midst of which you are required here once a week to magnify the Lord. Our churches--all those I have seen--are either like vaults or barns, the vault variety being slightly better and also more scarce. Their aggressive ugliness, and cold, repellent service keeping the congealed sinner at arm's length, nearly drove my mother into the Roman Church, a place no previous Watson had ever wanted to go to. The churches in Jena made her think with the tenderest regard of the old picturesque pre-Lutheran days, of the light and color and emotions of the Catholic services, and each time she was forced into one she said she made a bigger stride toward Rome. 'Luther was a most mischievous person,' she would say, glancing half defiantly through long eyelashes at Papa. But he only chuckled. He doesn't mind about Luther. Yet in case he did, in case some national susceptibility should have been hurt, she would get up lazily--her movements were as lazy as her tongue was quick--and take him by the ears and kiss him. She died when she was thirty-five: sweet and wonderful to the last. Nor did her beauty suffer in the least in the sudden illness that killed her. 'A lily in a linen-clout She looked when they had laid her out,' as your Meredith says; and on this day every year, this day of saints so dear to us, my spirit is all the time in those long ago happy years with her. I have no private altar in my room, no picture of a 'piteous Christ'--Papa took that--and no white flowers in this drenched autumnal place to show that I remember; nor do I read in the little books, except with gentle wonderment that she should have found nourishment in them, she who fed so constantly on the great poets. But I have gone each All Saints' Day for ten years past to church in Jena in memory of her, and tried by shutting my eyes to imagine I was in a beautiful place without whitewash, or hideous, almost brutal, stained glass.