“My ministering angel,” he named her to the Gilchrists, his keen eyes softened by ready dew. “John Randolph said, in his old age, of his mother: ‘She was the only being who ever understood me.’ I can say the same of my other and dearer self. She interprets my spirit intuitions when they are but partially known to myself. She meets my nature at every turn.” She met it to-day by mounting guard—sometimes literally—before the door of his study—the one room which was entirely in order—while he prepared his discourses for the ensuing Sabbath. The rest found enough and more than enough to do without the defended portal. Fanny was shut up in the dining room with the baby Annie, and warned not to be noisy. The twins carried bundles and boxes up and downstairs in their stocking-feet; Homer pried off covers with a muffled hammer, and shouldered trunks, empty and full, leaving his shoes at the foot of the stairs. Hester said nothing of a blinding headache and a “jumping pain” in her back while she dusted books and china. Hetty was everywhere and ever busy, and nobody spoke a loud word all day. “You might think there was a corpse in the study instead of a sermon being born!” Hester had once sneered to her confidante. “I never hear him preach, but I know I should be reminded of the mountain that brought forth a mouse.” One of her father’s many protests, addressed _at_ Hetty and _to_ his wife, was that their eldest born was “virtually a heathen.” “Home education in religion, even when administered by the wisest and tenderest of mothers—like yourself, my love—must still fall short of such godly nurture and admonition as are contemplated in the command: ‘Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.’ There is didactic theology in David’s holy breathing: ‘A day in thy courts is better than a thousand.’” “Better than a thousand in the same place? I should think so,” interposed Hester’s tuneless pipe. “He needn’t have been inspired to tell us that! Family worship suffices for my spiritual needs. That must be the porch to the ‘courts,’ at least.” In speaking she, too, looked at her mother, although every word was aimed at her father. “It is a cruel trick that we have!” Hetty had said of the habit. “Every ball strikes that much-tried and innocent woman, no matter who throws it.” “Of course!” retorted the sarcastic daughter. “And must while the angle of incidence is equal to that of reflection.” In the discussion upon family _versus_ church religion she carried her point by a _coup d’état_. “Pews and staring pewholders are all well enough for straight-backed Christians!” she snarled. “I won’t be made a holy show of to gratify all the preachers and presbyteries in America!”