good house to make a show with any more:  I want to be hospitable.  I don’t call giving dinners being hospitable.  I would have my house a hiding-place from the wind, a covert from the tempest.  That would be to be hospitable.  Ah! if your mother were with us, my child!  But you will be my little wife, as you have been for so many years now.—­God keeps open house; I should like to keep open house.—­I wonder does any body ever preach hospitality as a Christian duty?”

“I hope you won’t keep a butler, and set up for grand, father,” said Dorothy.

“Indeed I will not, my child.  I would not run the risk of postponing the pleasure of the Lord to that of inhospitable servants.  I will look to you to keep a warm, comfortable, welcoming house, and such servants only as shall be hospitable in heart and behavior, and make no difference between the poor and the rich.”

“I can’t feel that any body is poor,” said Dorothy, after a pause, “except those that can’t be sure of God.—­They are so poor!” she added.

“You are right, my child!” returned her father.  “It was not my poverty—­it was not being sure of God that crushed me.—­How long is it since I was poor, Dorothy?”

“Two days, father—­not two till to-morrow morning.”

“It looks to me two centuries.  My mind is at ease, and I have not paid a debt yet!  How vile of me to want the money in my own hand, and not be content it should be in God’s pocket, to come out just as it was wanted!  Alas!  I have more faith in my uncle’s leavings than in my Father’s generosity!  But I must not forget gratitude in shame.  Come, my child—­no one can see us—­let us kneel down here on the grass and pray to God who is in yon star just twinkling through the gray, and in my heart and in yours, my child.”

I will not give the words of the minister’s prayer.  The words are not the prayer.  Mr. Drake’s words were commonplace, with much of the conventionality and platitude of prayer-meetings.  He had always objected to the formality of the Prayer-book, but the words of his own prayers without book were far more formal; the prayer itself was in the heart, not on the lips, and was far better than the words.  But poor Dorothy heard only the words, and they did not help her.  They seemed rather to freeze than revive her faith, making her feel as if she never could believe in the God of her father.  She was too unhappy to reason well, or she might have seen that she was not bound to measure God by the way her father talked to him—­that the form of the prayer had to do with her father, not immediately with God—­that God might be altogether adorable, notwithstanding the prayers of all heathens and of all saints.

Their talk turned again upon the Old House of Glaston.