"And, sure enough, it was jest that way. Everybody was smilin' and sayin' they was glad to see me, and that reception was pretty much like shakin' hands with your neighbors after prayer-meetin' and church, only there was more of 'em.
"I started to wear my black alpaca to the reception, but Henrietta says, 'No, grandma, I've had a dress made especially for you.' Jest wait a minute, honey, and I'll get that dress."
And when she appeared a moment later her face wore the radiant look of a girl who displays her first party costume, or a bride her wedding-gown. Over her arm hung the reception gown of soft, black China silk, with plain full skirt and shirred waist. There were ruffles of point lace in the full sleeves, and she held up the point-lace cap and fichu that completed the costume.
"To think o' me wearin' such clothes," said Aunt Jane exultingly. "And the curious part of it was, child, that I hadn't had these things on five minutes, till I felt like they belonged to me, and it seemed as if I'd been wearin' lace and silk all my life. And Henrietta stood off and looked at me, and says she, 'Grandma, you look exactly like a family portrait.' And when Archibald come home after the reception, he says, says he, 'We ought to have grandma's picture painted in that dress.' And Henrietta says, 'Yes; and I want another picture of grandma in her old purple calico dress and gingham apron, settin' in that old high-back rockin'-chair with one of her patchwork quilts over her lap.' Says she, 'That's the way I remember seein' grandma when I was a little gyirl, and that's the way I want her picture taken.'"
She paused to shake out the lustrous silk and spread the fichu over it that I might see the delicate pattern of the lace.
"I started to leave this dress at Henrietta's," she observed, "for I knew I wouldn't have use for such clothes as these down here on the farm, but Henrietta folded 'em up and put 'em in my trunk, and she said I had to wear 'em every Sunday evenin' and sit out on the porch and think about her and Archibald. And then, child, when I die they can bury me in this dress." And her cheerful smile told me that if death had held any terrors for Aunt Jane, those terrors would be largely assuaged by the thought of going to her long rest in point lace and silk. Nigh on to eighty years, "but yet a woman!"
"Now what was the next thing I went to? Oh, yes! the Brownin' Club. Two or three days after the reception, Henrietta says to me, 'Grandma, the Brownin' Club meets with me this evenin', and I want you to put on your silk dress and come down to the parlor and listen to our papers.' And she told me who Brownin' was, and said she was goin' to read a paper on his home life.
"Well, I thought to myself that there wasn't much hope o' me understandin' anything I'd hear at that Brownin' Club, but of course I was glad to dress up again in my silk dress and my lace, and to please Henrietta I went down into the parlor and listened to the readin'. First, a young lady read a paper about the 'Message of Brownin'.' She said every poet had a message to give to the world jest like the prophets in Old-Testament times, and I gethered from her paper that Brownin' was a man that always looked on the bright side and believed that things was goin' to come right in the end; and towards the last she read some mighty pretty verses. I wish I could ricollect 'em all. It was somethin' about the spring o' the year and the mornin' and the dew like pearls and the birds flyin'. The words was jest like a picture of a spring mornin', and the last of it was, 'God's in his heaven—all's right with the world!' That's jest as true as anything in the Bible, and it sounds like it might 'a' come out o' the Bible, don't it, child?
"Then another lady read some o' Brownin's poetry, 'Pary—' somethin' or other."