I already see them reaching out their tendrils in courtship over the door.  I should not wonder if next Spring should celebrate their nuptials.  Some ivy, planted by Miss Moore, on the eastern side of the church promises in time to embosom it in green.  A parterre of flowers in the rear, has already helped to furnish the pulpit every Sunday with a bouquet, and, Miss Moore declares, will, another summer, give the minister a bouquet on his study table all the week, and messengers of beauty to add to the comfort of many a sick-room.  And in the Fall Deacon Goodsole and I with half a dozen young men from the pastor’s Bible-class are going up into the woods for some maples to set out in the place of the dead sticks which served only as monuments of the departed.

But Miss Moore is in a quandary.  She does not know what to do with her ten dollars.  All the work was given.  Even Pat Maloney, Roman Catholic though he is, would not take anything for spading up the ground for “our church garden.”

I am a conservative man.  But I do wish Miss Moore could be chairman of our board of trustees for a year or two.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Our Temperance Prayer-Meeting.

It is late in the fall.  The summer birds have fled southward.  The summer residents have fled to their city homes.  The mountains have blossomed out in all the brilliance of their autumnal colors; but the transitory glory has gone and they are brown and bare.  One little flurry of snow has given us warning of what is coming.  The furnace has been put in order; the double windows have been put on; a storm-house has enclosed our porch; a great pile of wood lies up against the stable, giving my boy promise of plenty of exercise during the long winter.  And still the summer lingers in these bright and glorious autumnal days.  And of them the carpenters and the painters are making much in their work on the new library-hall.

Do not let the reader deceive himself by erecting in his imagination an edifice of brick or stone, with all the magnificent architectural display which belongs to the modern style of American cosmopolitan architecture.  Library-hall is a plain wooden building, one story high, and containing but three rooms.  It is to cost us just $1,000, when it is finished.  Let me record here how it came to be begun.

Temperance is not one of the virtues for which Wheathedge is, or ought to be, famous.  I know not where you will find cooler springs of more delicious water, than gush from its mountain sides.  I know not where you will find grapes for home wine-that modern recipe for drunkenness-more abundant or more admirably adapted to the vintner’s purpose.  But the springs have few customers, and one man easily makes all the domestic wine which the inhabitants of Wheathedge consume.  But at the landing there are at least four grog-shops which give every indication of doing a thriving business, beside Poole’s, half-way to the Mill village; to say nothing of the bar the busiest room by all odds, at Guzzem’s hotel, busiest, alas! on the Sabbath day.