"And what if they are bad and troublesome, Glory?"
"Oh, they won't be," she replied. "I shall love them so!"
CHAPTER XXXV.
INDIAN SUMMER.
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"'Tis as if the benignant Heaven Had a new revelation given, And written it out with gems; For the golden tops of the elms And the burnished bronze of the ash And the scarlet lights that flash From the sumach's points of flame, Like blazonings on a scroll Spell forth an illumined Name For the reading of the soul!" |
It is of no use to dispute about the Indian summer. I never found two people who could agree as to the time when it ought to be here, or upon a month and day when it should be decidedly too late to look for it. It keeps coming. After the equinoctial, which begins to be talked about with the first rains of September, and isn't done with till the sun has measured half a dozen degrees of south declination, all the pleasant weather is Indian summer—away on to Christmastide. For my part, I think we get it now and then, little by little, as "the kingdom" comes. That every soft, warm, mellow, hazy, golden day, like each fair, fragrant life, is a part and outcrop of it; though weeks of gale and frost, or ages of cruel worldliness and miserable sin may lie between.
It was an Indian summer day, then; and it was in October.
Faith and Mr. Armstrong walked over the brook, and round by Pasture Rocks, to the "little chapel," as Faith had called it, since the time, last winter, when she and Glory had met the minister there, in the still, wonderful, pure beauty that enshrined it on that "diamond morning."