“Happy Christmas, Leighton, and many thanks to you for this consecrating service in my place of prayer.  After today, it will always seem a more hallowed shrine, and before you leave us, we will gather here as a family, and join in the celebration of the Holy Communion.”

They stood a moment hand in hand, looking into each other’s eyes; and watching them, Miss Patty’s heart swelled with pardonable pride in the two, whom her loving arms had so tenderly cradled.  Pinching her brother’s hand, as she walked with him under the velvet draperies, she whispered: 

“What a noble match for both!  And he’s only her second cousin.”

Leo’s eyes were wet with tears, which Doctor Douglass ascribed to devotional fervor; and withdrawing her hand, she opened one of the windows, and called the doves to the stone ledge, putting them very gently out upon the ivy wreaths that clambered up the wall, and peeped into the chapel.

“I believe you are sacristan here?” he said, pointing to the candles that flared, as the wind rushed in,

“Yes, here I sweep, dust, decorate daily, allowing no other touch; and here I bring my daintiest, rarest flowers, as tribute to Him who tapestried the earth with blossoms, and sprinkled it with perfumes—­ when?  Not until just before the advent of humanity, whose material kingdom was perfected, and furnished in anticipation of his arrival.”

Extinguishing the candles, she closed the old Bible, covered it with a square of velvet, and hung the cross of hyacinths upon the folded hands of one of the marble angels that upheld the altar,

“Pure-handed women are natural priestesses, meet for temple ministration; and I have no doubt your exoteric labors here, merely typify the secret daily sweeping out of evil thoughts, the dusting away of motes of selfishness, the decorating with noble beautiful aims, and holy deeds, whereby you sanctify that inner shrine, your own soul.”

“Praise from you means so much, that you need not stoop to flatter me.  The very vestments of you Levites should exhale infectious humility; and I especially need exhortations against pride, my besetting sin.  I built this chapel, not because I am good, but in order to grow better.  Every dwelling has its room in which the inmates gather to eat, to study, to work, to sleep; why not to pray, the most important privilege of many that divide humanity from brutes?  After all, the pagans were wiser than we, and the heads of families were household priests, setting examples of piety at every rising of the sun.”

“Let us see.  Greek and Roman fathers laid a cake dripping with wine, a wreath of violets, a heart of honey-comb, a brace of doves on the home altar, and immediately thereafter, set the example of violating every clause in the Decalogue.  Mark you, paganism drew fine lines in morals, long anterior to the era of monotheism and of Moses, and furnished immortal types of all the virtues; yet the excess of its religious ceremonial, robbed it of vital fructifying energies.  The frequency and publicity of sacerdotal service, usurped the place of daily individual piety.  The tendency of all outward symbolical observances, unduly multiplied, is to substitute mere formalism for fervor.”