XV.
Different Motives.
“WHAT a busy, cheerful little party!” exclaimed Mrs. Temple, as she entered the study on the afternoon of that same day, and found all her children sitting together, sewing, cutting, gilding, and chatting merrily as they worked. “You remind me of the busy, happy scene outside Jerusalem, beheld every year when the Feast of Tabernacles was kept.”
“What was the Feast of Tabernacles, mamma?” inquired Amy. Lucius would have asked the same question, but he dared not speak at that moment lest his breath should blow away the sheet of gold-leaf with which he was trying to cover his wires.
“The Feast of Tabernacles was a yearly festival held by the Israelites in remembrance of the time spent by their fathers in tabernacles or tents in the desert,” replied the lady. “This was the most cheerful of all the feasts, and was kept in a remarkable manner. The people made booths for themselves of the branches of palm, willow, and other trees, and for seven days lived in these booths. There were processions, glad hosannas, and sounds of singing and mirth. The people enjoyed their out-of-door life, and blessed the Lord for His goodness in guiding the Israelites through the wilderness to the good land in which their children now dwelt.”
“One could hardly keep such a feast in England,” observed Agnes, glancing out of the window at the gray sky and the dripping trees, which were dimly reflected in the pools left by the morning’s rain.
“I think that living in green leafy booths would be delightful in summer, even in England!” exclaimed Lucius, who had managed to fix his gold-leaf. “I should have liked, had I been a Jew, to have kept the Feast of Tabernacles—better perhaps than to have helped to make this model Tabernacle,” added the boy, who, after several hours of steady work, was beginning to feel rather tired. “I should much prefer hewing down branches, and doing the rough carpentering part of the business, to gilding these tiresome, fidgety wires, which I am sure to ungild again as soon as I attempt to fix them into their frame.”
“What, you are weary of your work already!” exclaimed Dora, as she paused in her sewing to thread her needle.
“Not exactly weary of it now,” answered Lucius, “but I guess that I shall be so long before this model is finished. It is all very well,” he continued, taking up his knife to hack away at some stubborn pasteboard—“it is all very well to make pillars and curtains while the sky is cloudy, and the rain falls fast, and I am kept prisoner at home; but suppose that the rain should stop, and the sun shine out, and the weather become settled at last, wouldn’t every one of us like running about in the fields all day, playing at cricket, or croquet, or rounders, better than measuring and cutting and——there! snap goes my knife, my new knife!” and with a gesture of impatience the boy flung the unmanageable pasteboard down on the table.