"P. S.—Don't worry about Dolly's dress. My pink brocade will cut over for her, and it is nearly as good as new. I'll bring it when I come."
On reading this letter the Doctor fell into a deep muse.
"Well, what do you think?" asked his wife.
"What? Who? I?" said the Doctor, with difficulty collecting himself from his reverie.
"Yes, you," answered his wife incisively, with just the kind of a tone to wake one out of a nap.
The fact was that the good Doctor had a little habit of departing unceremoniously into some celestial region of thought in the midst of conversation, and the notion of Dolly's going to Boston had aroused quite a train of ideas connected with certain doctrinal discussions now going on there in relation to the Socinian controversy, so that his wife's voice came to him from afar off, as one hears in a dream.
To Mrs. Cushing, whose specific work lay here, and now, in the matters of this present world, this little peculiarity of her husband was at times a trifle annoying; so she added, "I do wish you would attend to what we were talking about. Don't you think it would be just the best thing in the world for Dolly to make this visit to Boston?"
"Oh, certainly I do—by all means," he said eagerly, with the air of a man just waked up who wants to show he hasn't been asleep. "Yes, Dolly had better go."
The Doctor mused for another moment, and then added, in a sort of soliloquy: "Boston is a city of sacred associations; it is consecrated ground; the graves of our fathers, of the saints and the martyrs are there. I shall like little Dolly to visit them."
This was not precisely the point of view in which the visit was contemplated in the mind of his wife; but the enthusiasm was a sincere one. Boston, to all New England, was the Jerusalem—the city of sacred and religious memories; they took pleasure in her stones, and favored the dust thereof.