“Sakes alive!” said little Miss Prissy, after dinner, “did I ever hear any one go on like that blessed man?—­such a spiritual mind!  Oh, Miss Scudder, how you are privileged in having him here!  I do really think it is a shame such a blessed man a’n’t thought more of.  Why, I could just sit and hear him talk all day.  Miss Scudder, I wish sometimes you’d just let me make a ruffled shirt for him, and do it all up myself, and put a stitch in the hem that I learned from my sister Martha, who learned it from a French young lady who was educated in a convent;—­nuns, you know, poor things, can do some things right; and I think I never saw such hemstitching as they do there;—­and I should like to hemstitch the Doctor’s ruffles; he is so spiritually-minded, it really makes me love him.  Why, hearing him talk put me in mind of a real beautiful song of Mr. Watts,—­I don’t know as I could remember the tune.”

And Miss Prissy, whose musical talent was one of her special fortes, tuned her voice, a little cracked and quavering, and sang, with a vigorous accent on each accented syllable,—­

  “From the third heaven, where God resides,
    That holy, happy place,
  The New Jerusalem comes down,
    Adorned with shining grace.

  “Attending angels shout for joy,
    And the bright armies sing,—­
  ’Mortals! behold the sacred seat
    Of your descending King!’”

“Take care, Miss Scudder!—­that silk must be cut exactly on the bias”; and Miss Prissy, hastily finishing her last quaver, caught the silk and the scissors out of Mrs. Scudder’s hand, and fell down at once from the Millennium into a discourse on her own particular way of covering piping-cord.

So we go, dear reader,—­so long as we have a body and a soul.  Two worlds must mingle,—­the great and the little, the solemn and the trivial, wreathing in and out, like the grotesque carvings on a Gothic shrine;—­only, did we know it rightly, nothing is trivial; since the human soul, with its awful shadow, makes all things sacred.  Have not ribbons, cast-off flowers, soiled bits of gauze, trivial, trashy fragments of millinery, sometimes had an awful meaning, a deadly power, when they belonged to one who should wear them no more, and whose beautiful form, frail and crushed as they, is a hidden and a vanished thing for all time?  For so sacred and individual is a human being, that, of all the million-peopled earth, no one form ever restores another.  The mould of each mortal type is broken at the grave; and never, never, though you look through all the faces on earth, shall the exact form you mourn ever meet your eyes again!  You are living your daily life among trifles that one death-stroke may make relics.  One false step, one luckless accident, an obstacle on the track of a train, the tangling of the cord in shifting a sail, and the penknife, the pen, the papers, the trivial articles of dress and clothing, which to-day you toss idly and jestingly from hand to hand, may become dread memorials of that awful tragedy whose deep abyss ever underlies our common life.