children at the last. He knew the "Old Adam" in us all, especially as he
reappeared in the little folk. "But I don't believe the depravity is
total, do you?" he said, "else a child would not care to hear about Mary's
Little One;"--and then he would go on, following the Carpenter's Son about
the cottage and over the hill, and rejoicing that, in following Him thus,
he came back to his own open-eyed childhood, "But, you know," said he,
"my childhood was full of the absurdities and strenuosities" (this last
was his word) "of my puritan surroundings. Why, I never knew how naturally
and easily I can get back into the veins of an old puritan grandfather
that one of my grandmothers must have had--and how hard it is for me to
behave there, until I read Alice Morse Earle's 'The Sabbath in New
England.' I read that book nearly all night, if haply I might subdue the
confusion and sorrows that were wrought in me by eating a Christmas pie on
that feast-day. The fact is, my immediate ecclesiastical belongings are
Episcopalian. I am of the church of Archbishop Laud and King Charles of
blessed memory. I like good, thick Christmas pie, 'reeking with sapid
juices,' full-ripe and zealous for good or ill. But my 'Separatist'
ancestors all mistook gastric difficulties for spiritual graces, and,
living in me, they all revolt and want to sail in the Mayflower, or hold
town-meetings inside of me after feast-day."

Then, as if he had it in his mind,--poor, pale, yellow-skinned sufferer,--
to attract one to the book he delighted in, he related that he fell asleep
with this delicious volume in his hand, and this is part of the dream he
sketched afterward:

"I went alone to the meeting-house the which those who are sinfully
inclined toward Rome would call a 'church,' and it was on the Sabbath day.
I yearned and strove to repent me of the merry mood and full sorry humors
of Christmastide. For did not Judge Sewall make public his confession of