After church, Thursday.—­I must indulge myself with going on with my letter, for after dinner I want to play with the children, and make this day mean something to them besides pies.  For everybody spoke for pies this year (you know we almost never make such sinful things) and they all said ice-cream wouldn’t do at all, so yesterday I made fourteen of these enormities, and mean to stuff them (the children, not the pies!) so that they won’t want any more for a year.  I want to tell you about some pretty coincidences; we went to church in a dismal rain, and Mr. Prentiss preached on the beauty of holiness, and every time he said anything that made sunshine particularly appropriate, the sun came in in floods, then disappeared till the next occasion.  For instance, he spoke of the sunshine of a happy home as so much brighter than that of the natural sun, and the whole church was instantly illuminated; then he said that if we had each come there with ten million sorrows, Christ could give us light, when, lo, the church glowed again; and so on half-a-dozen times, till at last he quoted the verse "And the Lamb is the light thereof," when a perfect blaze of effulgence made those mysterious, words almost startling.  And then he wound up by describing the Tyrolese custom on which Mrs. Field’s poem is founded, which he had himself seen and enjoyed, and of which, it seems, he spoke at East Dorset last summer at the Sunday-school. [8] I read the poem and letter to him the instant we got home, and he admired them both.  It was a little singular that her poem and his sermon came to me at almost the identical moment, wasn’t it?

I must tell you about an old ladies’ party given by Mrs. Cummings, wife of him who prepared my father’s memoir. [9] She had had a fortune left to her and was all the time doing good with it, and it entered her head to get up a very nice supper for twenty-six old ladies, the youngest of whom was seventy-five (the Portland people rarely die till they’re ninety or so).  She sent carriages for all who couldn’t walk, and when they all got together, the lady who described the scene to me, said it was indescribably beautiful, all congratulating each other that they were so far on in their pilgrimage and so near heaven!  Lovely, wasn’t it?  I wish I could spend the rest of my life with such people!  Then she spoke of Mrs. C.’s face during the last six months of her life, when it had an expression so blest, so seraphic, that it was a delight to look upon it—­and how she had all the members of the ladies’ prayer-meeting come and kiss her good-bye after she was too weak to speak.