Christian life -- Fiction; Conduct of life -- Fiction; Physicians -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction; Soldiers -- Fiction
THAT last Sabbath of August was a lovely day; it was the first Sabbath
that our girls had spent at home since the revelation of Chautauqua. It
seemed lovely to them. "The world looks as though it was made over new
in the night," Eurie had said, as she threw open her blinds, and drew in
whiffs of the sweet, soft air. And the church, whither these girls had
so often betaken themselves on summer mornings, just like this one--how
_could_ two or three weeks have changed it? They could not feel that it
was the same building.
Hitherto it had been to them simply the First Church; grander, by
several degrees, than any other church in the city, having the finest
choir, and the finest organ, and the most elegant carpets, and making
the grandest floral display of all the temples, as became the First
Church, of course; but to-day, this glowing, glorious August day, it was
something infinitely above and beyond all this; it was the visible
temple of the invisible God, _their_ Saviour, and they were going up to
worship--aye, really and truly to _worship_. They, in their different
ways, according to their very different natures, felt this and were
thrilled with it as their feet trod the aisles. People can feel a great
many things, and not show them to the casual observer. Sitting in their
respective pews, they looked in no sense different from the way they had
looked on a hundred different Sabbaths before this.
Ruth Erskine, in the corner of her father's pew, attired, as she had
often been before, in the most delicate and exquisite of summer silks,
with exactly the right shade of necktie, gloves and sash, to set off
the beauty of the dress, with the soft and delicate laces about her
white throat, for which she was especially noted, looked not one whit
different from the lady who sat there three weeks before. You wouldn't
have known that her heart was singing for joy.
Flossy Shipley, aglow with elegance, as she always was, looked the same
airy butterfly that had flitted in and out of that church on many a
summer day before; and Marion, in her corner in the gallery, was simply
the grave, somewhat weary-looking school-teacher at one of the wards--"a
girl with infidel tendencies," that is all the great congregation knew
about her; in fact, comparatively few of them knew even that.
Eurie Mitchell was the doctor's eldest daughter, and had in no sense
improved as to her toilet--"a thing which could hardly be expected,
since she had thrown away so much money on that wild scheme of living in
the woods;" that was what some of the congregation thought about her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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