Emily's eyes sparkled with keen though good-natured satire. There was a flood of crimson color in her cheeks, not entirely the effect of her brisk walk in the open air. She had a spasm of coughing, which she endured as though such discomforts had become quite a matter of course, merely remarking when she had recovered herself sufficiently to speak:—
"Thar', that'll last me for one spell, I guess."
"Won't you set, Emily?" said Grandma.
"No," said Emily. "I can't. I jest come up to tell my man, there, to go home! Levi is over from West Wallen, and wants to see him. Lord, I didn't know you'd got a party, Miss Keeler!" she continued, glancing with an irresistibly comical expression about the room.
"Oh, no! we ain't got no party," said Grandma Keeler, pleasantly. "They jest happened to drop in along."
"Wall now, I should think there'd ben a shower and rained 'em all down at once:" again surveying the occupants of the room with a comprehensively critical air that was hardly flattering.
"I don't see what on 'arth!" she went on. "Half the time you might ransack Wallencamp from top to bottom, and you'd find everybody a'most somewhere, and nobody to hum! It ain't much like the cake Silvy made last week—she's crazier than ever—'Where's the raisins, Silvy?' says I—I always make it chock full of 'em, and there wasn't one,—'Oh,' says Silvy, 'I mixed 'em up so thorough you can't a hardly find 'em.' 'I guess that's jest about the way the Lord put the idees into your head, Silvy,' says I. 'Bless the Lord!' says that poor fool, as slow and solemn as a minister."
"We've been a singing" interposed Grandma Keeler in a voice that contrasted with Emily's, like the flow of a great calm river with the impatient fall of a cataract. "It seems a' most as though I'd been in Heaven. They was jest a singin'—'The Light of the World is Jesus,' I shall never forgit, when I was down to camp-meetin' to Marthy's Vin'yard a good while ago—there was a little blind boy stood up on a bench and sung it all alone; and it made me cry to see him standin' there with his poor little white face, and eyes that couldn't see a' one of all the faces lookin' up to him, a singin' that out as bold and free, and he did pronounce the words so beautiful so as everybody could hear—I can hear him a singin' of it out, now—'The Light of the World is Jesus.' And I suppose we git to thinkin' that the light's in our eyes, maybe, or the light's in the sun, or the light's in the lamp, maybe. But you might put out my eyes,"—said Grandma Keeler, closing her eyes as she spoke, and looking very peaceful and happy—"and you might put out the sun, and you might put out the lamp, and say—'Thar', Almiry's all in the dark room, she can't see nothin' now'—but the Light of the World 'ud be thar jest the same, you couldn't put out the light—'The Light of the World is Jesus.'"
"Oh, I didn't know ye was havin' a meetin'," said Emily Gaskell, mockingly.
"No more we ain't, Emily," said Grandma Keeler. "We was jest cheerin' ourselves up a little, singin' about home. Come you, now, and sing with us":