"The images, yes. But connect any spot of earth with heaven, by any tie, and it must have a certain sort of grandeur. You have been working in brick and mortar to-day, Mignonette, to-morrow I must give you a bird's-eye view."
Faith was silent a minute; and then said, "It don't look a happy place to me, Endecott."
"No, it is too human. You want an elm tree or a patch of dandelions between every two houses."
"That wouldn't do," said Faith, "unless the people could be less ragged, and dirty, and uneasy; and their houses too. There's nothing like it in Pattaquasset."
"I have great confidence in the comforting and civilizing power of elm trees and green grass," said Mr. Linden. "But Carlyle says 'Man is not what you can call a happy animal, his appetite for sweet victual is so enormous;' and perhaps New York suffers as much from the fact that everybody wants more, as that some have too little and others too much."
"Do these people want more?" said Faith softly.
"Without doubt! So does everybody in New York but me."
"But why must people do that in New York, when they don't do it in
Pattaquasset?" said Faith, who was very like mignonette at the moment.
"The appetite grows with indulgence, or the possibility of it. Besides, little bird, in Pattaquasset you take all this breeze of humanity winnowed through elm branches. There, you know, 'My soul into the boughs does glide.'"
"No," said Faith; "it is not that. When my soul glides nowhere, and there are no branches, either; in the Roscoms' house, Endecott—and poor Mrs. Dow's, and Sally Lowndes',—people don't look as they look here. I don't mean here, in Madison Square—though yes I do, too; there was that raspberry girl; and others, worse, I have seen even here. But I have been in other places—Mr. Pulteney and his sisters took me all the way to the great stone church, Endecott."