While the service thus drags its length along, the hymn which Emmy Lou both can find for herself and can sing heartily being the only oasis in the desert of her morning, there is worse ahead. Between two uprising peaks of the amens, one of which is reached with the close of the hymn, lies that valley of dry bones called the sermon.
Dr. Angell is beginning it now. "'Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.'"
This seems a reasonably clear and definite statement even to Emmy Lou, not quite nine and slow to follow. But no.
"The Psalmist was given to imagery, which is to say, was an Oriental," begins Dr. Angell. And so one goes down with him into the valley of dry bones.
The mind wanders anew. How can it help wandering? Albert Eddie Dawkins is across the church in a side pew with his big sister, Sarah. She has decided that he shall try for a rector's prize too. He is low in his mind about it, and said so to Emmy Lou coming out of Sunday school this morning.
Joe Kiffin made a proposition to him that he could not accept, Joe being the big boy who drove the wagon and delivered for the Dawkins grocery.
"He said he would take me and another boy this morning to a place where we can get all the honey locusts we want. A place where the ground is covered with 'em. But we both had to come to Sunday school and stay to church, and Joe says we can't expect him to take us in the afternoon when it's the only afternoon he's got. You know honey locusts?"
Emmy Lou was compelled to admit that she did not.
"Well," a little anxiously, "I don't either. But if I and the other boy could have gone with Joe, I'd have found out."
