“You ought to have seen the look the child gave me! Delight and fear and incredulous bewilderment tumbled over each other, as if I had proposed taking her into a forbidden fairy-land. “‘Why, Mrs. Forceythe! Why, they won’t let anybody have a piano up there! not in _heaven_?’ “I laid down the question-book, and asked what kind of place she supposed that heaven was going to be. “‘O,’ she said, with a dreary sigh, ‘I never think about it when I can help it. I suppose we _shall all just stand there_!’ “And you?” I asked of the next, a bright girl with snapping eyes. “‘Do you want me to talk good, or tell the truth?’ she answered me. Having been given to understand that she was not expected to ‘talk good’ in my class, she said, with an approving, decided nod: ‘Well, then! I don’t think it’s going to be _anything nice_ anyway. No, I don’t! I told my last teacher so, and she looked just as shocked, and said I never should go there as long as I felt so. That made me mad, and I told her I didn’t see but I should be as well off in one place as another, except for the fire.’ “A silent girl in the corner began at this point to look interested. ‘I always supposed,’ said she, ‘that you just floated round in heaven--you know--all together--something like ju-jube paste!’ “Whereupon I shut the question-book entirely, and took the talking to myself for a while. “‘But I _never_ thought it was anything like that,’ interrupted little Clo, presently, her cheeks flushed with excitement. ‘Why, I should like to go, if it is like that! I never supposed people talked, unless it was about converting people, and saying your prayers, and all that.’ “Now, weren’t those ideas[B] alluring and comforting for young girls in the blossom of warm human life? They were trying with all their little hearts to ‘be good,’ too, some of them, and had all of them been to church and Sunday school all their lives. Never, never, if Jesus Christ had been Teacher and Preacher to them, would He have pictured their blessed endless years with Him in such bleak colors. They are not the hues of His Bible.” [B] Facts. XI. July 16. We took a trip to-day to East Homer for butter. Neither angels nor principalities could convince Phœbe that any butter but “Stephen David’s” might, could, would, or should be used in this family. So to Mr. Stephen David’s, a journey of four miles, I meekly betake myself at stated periods in the domestic year, burdened with directions about firkins and half-firkins, pounds and half-pounds, salt and no salt, churning and “working-over”; some of which I remember and some of which I forget, and to all of which Phœbe considers me sublimely incapable of attending.