There is a joy for souls distressed,
A balm for every wounded breast,—
’Tis found alone in Heaven!”
We sang, last of all, The Shining Shore, and talked of the time when the composer set the MS. upon the piano-rack, with the ink hardly dried upon the score, and trial was made of the music in that very room—could it be just eleven years ago?
My father left us as the clock struck ten. My mother lingered half an hour later. We all knew, although none of us spoke of it, that he liked to have a little time for devotional reading on Sunday evening, before he went to bed. He had not demitted the habit in fifty-odd years, yet I doubt if he had ever mentioned, even to his wife, why he kept it up and what it meant to him.
Our mother told me afterward that when she joined him in their chamber, the Bible was still open on the stand before him. He closed it at her entrance and glanced around, a smile of serene happiness lighting up his face.
“We have had a delightful Sunday!” he observed. “It is like renewing my youth to have all the children about us once more.”
He had had his breakfast and gone down-town, when we came into the dining-room next morning. At my exclamation of regretful surprise, our mother told us how he had hurried the meal for himself, pleading that he had much to attend to that forenoon. The snow was not deep, but it was sodden by the fine rain that had succeeded it toward the dawn of the gray December day, and he feared the evergreens might not be forthcoming.
“I shall send a couple of carts into the country at once,” were his parting words. “I would not have the children disappointed for ten times the worth of the evergreens.”
It was to be a busy morning with us all. As soon as breakfast was dispatched, the long table—pulled out to its utmost limit to accommodate the tribe—was cleared of dishes, plates, and cloth, and we fell to tying up parcels for the tree, sorting bonbons, and other light tasks. Mince-pies, concocted according to the incomparable recipe handed down from mother to daughter, in the Montrose and Olney families, for a century-and-a-half, had been baked last week, and loaded the pantry-shelves. My mother’s unsurpassable crullers, superintended by herself at Christmas, and at no other season, were packed away in stone jars; and, that no distinctive feature of Yule-tide might be missing from the morrow’s dinner, the whitest, plumpest, tenderest sucking pig the market could offer, lay at length in a platter in the store-room. Before he could go into the oven, he would be buttered from nose to toes, and coated with bread-crumbs. When he appeared on the table, he would be adorned with a necklace of sausages, cranberries would fill out the sunken eyes, and a lemon be thrust into his mouth. A mammoth gobbler, fattened for the occasion, would support him at the other end of the board.