Divers Women | Page 4

a perfect match your silk is! Where did you succeed so well? I was dying to see that dress! I told mamma if it were not for the first sight of that dress, and of Laura's face when she saw it was so much more elegant than hers, I should have been tempted to take a nap this morning instead of coming to church. However, I got a delicious one as it was. Weren't you horribly sleepy?"
At this point Misses Lily and Lorena are joined by the said "Jim." And be it noticed that he makes the first remark on the sermon that has been heard as yet.
"We had a stunning sermon this morning, didn't we?"
"Oh, you shocking fellow!" murmurs Lorena "How can you use such rough words?"
"What words!' Stunning?' Why, dear me, that is a jolly word; so expressive. I say, you sheep in this fold took it pretty hard. A fellow might be almost glad of being a goat, I think."
"Jim, don't be wicked," puts in Miss Lily who has a cousinship in the said Jim, and therefore can afford to be brusque. Jim shrugs his shoulders.
"Wicked," he says. "If the preacher is to be credited, it is you folks who are wicked. I don't pretend, you know, to be anything else."
A change of subject seems to the fair Lorena to be desirable, so she says:
"Why were you not at the hop last night, Mr. Merchant?"
And Jim replies, "I didn't get home in time. I was at the races. I hear you had a stunning--I beg your pardon--a perfectly splendid time. Those are the right words, I believe."
And then the two ladies gathered their silken trains into an aristocratic grasp of the left hand, and sailed down town on either side of "Jim" to continue the conversation. And those coral lips had but just sung--
"My thoughts lie open to the Lord, Before they're formed within; And ere my lips pronounce the word He knows the sense I mean."
What could He have thought of her? Is it not strange that she did not ask this of herself.
"How are you to-day?" Mr. Jackson asked, shaking his old acquaintance, Mr. Dunlap, heartily by the hand. "Beautiful day, isn't it?"
Now, what will be the next sentence from the lips of those gray-headed men, standing in the sanctuary, with the echo of solemn service still in their ears? Listen:
"Splendid weather for crops. A man with such a farm as mine on his hands, and so backward with his work, rather grudges such Sundays as these this time of year."
And the other?
"Yes," he says, laughing, "you could spare the time better if it rained, I dare say. By the way, Dunlap, have you sold that horse yet? If not, you better make up your mind to let me have it at the price I named. You won't do better than that this fell."
Whereupon ensued a discussion on the respective merits and demerits, and the prospective rise and fall in horse-flesh.
"Take heed what ye do; let the fear of the Lord be upon you." Had those two gentlemen heard that text?

CHAPTER II.
SOME PEOPLE WHO FORGOT THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT.
Let me introduce to you the Harrison dinner-table, and the people gathered there on the afternoon of that Sabbath day. Miss Lily had brought home with her her cousin Jim; he was privileged on the score of relationship. Miss Helen, another daughter of the house, had invited Mr. Harvey Latimer; he was second cousin to Kate's husband, and Kate was a niece of Mrs. Harrison; relationship again. Also, Miss Fannie and Miss Cecilia Lawrence were there, because they were schoolgirls, and so lonely in boarding-school on Sunday, and their mother was an old friend of Mrs. Harrison; there are always reasons for things.
The dinner-table was a marvel of culinary skill. Clearly Mrs. Harrison's cook was not a church-goer. Roast turkey, and chicken-pie, and all the side dishes attendant upon both, to say nothing of the rich and carefully prepared dessert, of the nature that indicated that its flankiness was not developed on Saturday, and left to wait for Sunday. Also, there was wine on Mrs. Harrison's table; just a little home-made wine, the rare juice of the grape prepared by Mrs. Harrison's own cook--not at all the sort of wine that others indulged in--the Harrisons were temperance people.
"I invited Dr. Selmser down to dinner," remarked Mrs. Harrison, as she sipped her coffee. "I thought since his wife was gone, it would be only common courtesy to invite him in to get a warm dinner, but he declined; he said his Sunday dinners were always very simple."
Be it known to you that Dr. Selmser was Mrs. Harrison's pastor, and the preacher of the morning sermon.
Miss Lily arched her handsome eyebrows.
"Oh, mamma!" she said, "how could you be guilty of