On this particular dewy, fresh summer morning it seemed as if Nature herself were hushing her breath to hear the music of a higher sphere. Dolly stood at her open window looking out on the wooded hills opposite, feathered with their varied green, on the waving meadows with their buttercups and daisies, on the old apple tree in the corner of the lot where the bobolink was tilting up and down, chattering and singing with all his might. She was thinking of what she had heard her father saying to her mother at breakfast: how the sickness and death of one good woman had been blessed to all that neighborhood, and how a revival of religion was undoubtedly begun there. All this made Dolly very serious. She thought a great deal about heaven, and perfectly longed to be quite sure she ever should get there. She often had wished that there were such a thing in reality as a Wicket Gate, and an old Interpreter's house, and a Palace Beautiful, for then she would set right off on her pilgrimage at once, and in time get to the Celestial City. But how to get this spiritual, intangible preparation she knew not. To-day she knew was a sacramental Sunday, and she should see all the good people taking that sacrificial bread and wine, but she should be left out. And how to get in! There were no Sunday-schools in those days, no hymns or teachings specially adapted to the child; and Dolly remembered to have heard serious elderly people tell of how they were brought "under conviction" and suffered for days and weeks before the strange secret of mercy was revealed to them, and she wondered how she ever should get this conviction of sin. Poor Dolly had often tried to feel very solemn and sad and gloomy, and to think herself a dreadful sinner, but had never succeeded. She was so young and so healthy--the blood raced and tingled so in her young veins; and if she was pensive and sad a little while, yet, the first she knew, she would find herself racing after Spring, or calling to her brothers, or jumping up and down with her skipping rope, and feeling full as airy and gay as the bobolink across in the meadow. This morning she was trying her best to feel her sins and count them up; but the birds and the daisies and the flowers were a sad interruption, and she went to meeting quite dissatisfied. When she saw the white simple table and the shining cups and snowy bread of the Communion she inly thought that the service could have nothing for her--it would be all for those grown-up, initiated Christians. Nevertheless, when her father began to speak she was drawn to listen to him by a sort of pathetic earnestness in his voice.