"Yes," chimed in Miss Vardell, Sadie's sweet senior, "it was perfectly fascinating. I shall never forget it as long as I live."
"I really think you will have to let us speak our mind," added their mother. "Your Geneva gown was so becoming; I do so wish our Southern ministers would adopt it. And the sermon was perfect. I especially admired the way it seemed to grow out of the text; they seemed to grow together like a vine twining around a tree."
I endured this tender pelting with the best grace I could command, though this was the first time I had ever been the centre of such a hosannah thunder-storm. The tribute to the kinship of text and sermon, however, was really very pleasing to me. Just at this juncture, when a new batch of compliments was about to be produced, smoking hot, an aged aunt, the prisoner of years, ventured an enquiry.
"I wish I could have been there—but I am far past that," she said. "What was the text, Sadie?"
Sadie flew into the chamber of her memory to catch it before it should escape. But the sudden invasion had evidently alarmed it, for it had gone. She silently pursued it into space, but returned empty-handed.
"That's strange," she faltered; "it was a lovely text," she added, by way of consolation. "But it's gone; I was so taken up with the sermon that I must have failed to remember the text," she concluded, false to her first love, but faithful to her guest.
"Well, Josie," said the still unenlightened aunt, "I will have to look to you. You will tell me what it was."
Josie joined in the chase, but their prey had had a noble start and was now far beyond them.
"It was in the New Testament, I think," said Josie, pleased with this pledge of accuracy, and satisfied that she had outrun her sister—"and it was tolerably long." This was said with the air of one who had almost identified it and might justly leave the rest to the imagination. "I reckon I could find it if I had a Bible," she added hopefully.
No Bible was produced, for that would have been taking an unfair advantage of the fugitive; but the eulogists began their mental search in unison, quoting various fragments of my morning prayer at family worship, which they carefully retained as witnesses. After they had ransacked every mental corridor in vain they acknowledged the fruitlessness of the quest, and I myself told their aged relative the text.