silent lady-boarders with them, whose eyes would have kept Cupid and Psyche to their good behavior.  A day or two after this I noticed that the young gentleman had left his seat, which you may remember was at the corner diagonal to that of Iris, so that they have been as far removed from each other as they could be at the table.  His new seat is three or four places farther down the table.  Of course I made a romance out of this, at once.  So stupid not to see it!  How could it be otherwise?—­Did you speak, Madam?  I beg your pardon. (To my lady-reader.)

I never saw anything like the tenderness with which this young girl treats her little deformed neighbor.  If he were in the way of going to church, I know she would follow him.  But his worship, if any, is not with the throng of men and women and staring children.

I, the Professor, on the other hand, am a regular church-goer.  I should go for various reasons, if I did not love it; but I am happy enough to find great pleasure in the midst of devout multitudes, whether I can accept all their creeds or not.  One place of worship comes nearer than the rest to my ideal standard, and to this it was that I carried our young girl.

The Church of the Galileans, as it is called, is even humbler in outside pretensions than the Church of Saint Polycarp.  Like that, it is open to all comers.  The stranger who approaches it looks down a quiet street and sees the plainest of chapels,—­a kind of wooden tent, that owes whatever grace it has to its pointed windows and the high, sharp roof,—­traces, both, of that upward movement of ecclesiastical architecture which soared aloft in cathedral-spires, shooting into the sky as the spike of a flowering aloe from the cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below.  This suggestion of mediaeval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which a hand-bell might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was all of outward show the small edifice could boast.  Within there was very little that pretended to be attractive.  A small organ at one side, and a plain pulpit, showed that the building was a church; but it was a church reduced to its simplest expression.

Yet when the great and wise monarch of the East sat upon his throne, in all the golden blaze of the spoils of Ophir and the freights of the navy of Tarshish, his glory was not like that of this simple chapel in its Sunday garniture.  For the lilies of the field, in their season, and the fairest flowers of the year, in due succession, were clustered every Sunday morning over the preacher’s desk.  Slight, thin-tissued blossoms of pink and blue and virgin white in early spring, then the full-breasted and deep-hearted roses of summer, then the velvet-robed crimson and yellow flowers of autumn, and in the winter delicate exotics that grew under skies of glass in the false summers of our crystal palaces without knowing that it was the dreadful winter of New England which was rattling the doors and frosting the panes,—­the whole year told its history of life and growth and beauty from that simple desk.  There was always at least one good sermon,—­this floral homily.  There was at least one good prayer,—­that brief space when all were silent, after the manner of the Friends at their devotions.