4th.
We have been devoting ourselves to feminine vanities all day out in the orchard. Aunt Winifred has been making her summer bonnet, and I some linen collars. I saw, though she said nothing, that she thought the crêpe a little gloomy, and I am going to wear these in the mornings to please her.
She has an accumulation of work on hand, and in the afternoon I offered to tuck a little dress for Faith,—the prettiest pink barège affair pale as a blush rose, and about as delicate. Faith, who had been making mud-pies in the swamp, and was spattered with black peat from curls to stockings, looked on approvingly, and wanted it to wear on a flag-root expedition to-morrow. It seemed to do me good to do something for somebody after all this lonely and—I suspect—selfish idleness.
6th.
I read a little of Dr. Chalmers to-day, and went laughing to Aunt Winifred with the first sentence.
“There is a limit to the revelations of the Bible about futurity, and it were a mental or spiritual trespass to go beyond it.”
“Ah! but,” she said, “look a little farther down.”
And I read, “But while we attempt not to be ‘wise above that which is written,’ we should attempt, and that most studiously, to be wise up to that which is written.”
8th.
It occurred to me to-day, that it was a noticeable fact, that, among all the visits of angels to this world of which we are told, no one seems to have discovered in any the presence of a dead friend. If redeemed men are subject to the same laws as they, why did such a thing never happen? I asked Aunt Winifred, and she said that the question reminded her of St. Augustine’s lonely cry thirty years after the death of Monica: “Ah, the dead do not come back; for, had it been possible, there has not been a night when I should not have seen my mother!” There seemed to be two reasons, she said, why there should be no exceptions to the law of silence imposed between us and those who have left us; one of which was, that we should be overpowered with familiar curiosity about them, which nobody seems to have dared to express in the presence of angels, and the secrets of their life God has decreed that it is unlawful to utter.