“Oh! now I'll find it,” said her mother. “I know about Psalms, for my good old grandfather used to be always reading them, and I used to think it was queer the way they was spelt—with a 'p' at the beginning. I saw them over here a minute ago.”
Then after a little more searching she inquired,
“Is this it? 'The Lord is my Shepherd: I shall not want.'”
“The very thing!” Jennie exclaimed joyfully.
Mrs. Scott, though with some difficulty, managed to read it, while Jennie listened with closed eyes and clasped hands, thinking of the delightful places into which the Shepherd leads his flock.
“They're sweet verses,” said Mrs. Scott, as she closed the book, after laying a piece of yarn in to mark the place, “and it rests a body to read them. I call to mind now that many's the time I've heard my granddad read 'em. And I've heard 'em in church, too, when I used to go.”
“Why don't you go to church sometimes now, mother?” Jennie asked. “There's nobody to rail at you for going. You might borrow Mrs. O'Brien's bonnet after she's been to mass, and go round to the church on the front street, where we hear the singing from every Sunday.”
Mrs. Scott began to think she should like to go. She cleaned off her old black alpaca as well as possible, and the next Sunday, borrowing her kindly Catholic neighbor's bonnet, she went to church for the first time in many years.
She came home delighted, and had much to tell Jennie about the pleasant gentleman who gave her a seat and invited her to come again, about the good sermon that she could understand every bit of, and the rousing hymns, which indeed Jennie could hear with the window open.
Not long after this, one of the ladies Mrs. Scott worked for gave her a partly-worn sateen dress and a black straw bonnet, so that she was fitted out to go to church all summer; and go she did with great enjoyment. It was a pleasure to Jennie also, for with listening to the singing as she lay in bed, and hearing about all that was said and done from her mother, she almost felt as though she had been at church herself.