The sun itself seemed to shine with a calmer and silenter radiance over the broad, leisurely land.
Time enough, bless you! and the Sunday, any way, is so long!
This Sunday morning, at ten o'clock, Dorcas has already been up and dressed six hours. Everything having the remotest connection with domestic duties has been finished and laid aside long ago, and she has devoted the last two hours to solitary meditations, mostly of the kind already mentioned.
In the great oven, since last night, has lain the Sunday supper of baked pork-and-beans, Indian-pudding, and brown bread, all the better the longer they bake, and all unfailing in their character of excellence. In the square room, in the green arm-chair, sits the Colonel, fast asleep.
Four hours ago, he fumed and fretted about barn and cow-house, breakfasted, and had family-prayers. Since then, he has donned his Sabbath array, both mental and bodily. Mentally, having dismissed the cares of the week, he has strictly united himself with his body, and gone to sleep. Bodily, he appears in a suit of hemlock-dyed, with Matherman buttons, knee- and shoe-buckles of silver. His gray hair is neatly composed in a queue, his full cheeks rest on his portly chest, and the outward visibly harmonizes with the inward man. He sleeps soundly now, purposing faithfully to keep awake during the three-and-twenty heads of the minister's discourse. If he finds it too much for him, he means to stand, as he often does. Sometimes he partakes freely of the aromatic stimulants carried by his wife and daughter as bouquets. The southernwood wakes him, and the green seeds of the caraway get him well along through the sermon.
Mrs. Fox steps softly in, rustling in the same black taffeta she always wears, and the same black silk bonnet,—worn just fifty-two days in a year, and carefully pinned and boxed away for all the other three hundred and thirteen.
As fashions did not come to Walton oftener than once in ten years, it followed that apparel among the young people wore very much the expression of individual taste, while among the elders it was wont to assume the cast now irreverently designated by "fossil remains." And, really, it did not much matter. Whatever our country-grandmothers were admired and esteemed for, be sure it was not dress.
As the clock pointed to half-past ten, the door opened quickly, and Dorcas stood on the threshold, like a summer breeze that has stopped one moment its fluttering, and hovers fresh, sweet, and sunny in the morning air. The breath of her presence, if indeed it were not association, roused old Colonel Fox from his sleep. He glanced at her, took the ready arm of his wife, looked again at the clock, and passed out over the flat door-stone with his cocked hat and cane, as became an invalid soldier and a gentleman. Behind them, hymn-book in hand and with downcast eyes, walked Dorcas. Not a word passed between the parents and their only daughter. On Sunday, people were not to think their own thoughts. And familiarity between parents and children, never allowed even on week-days, would have been unpardonable unfitness on the Sabbath.
They reached the church-door just as the minister, with his white wig shedding powder on his venerable back, passed up the broad-aisle. A perfectly decorous throng of the loiterers followed, and the pews rapidly filled. The Colonel and his wife, being persons of consequence, took their way with suitable dignity and deliberation. In the three who turned, about half-way up the broad-aisle, into a square pew, a physiognomist would have seen at one glance the characteristic features of each mind. In the Colonel, choleric, fresh, and warm-hearted, a good lover, and not very good hater. In his wife, "a chronicler of small-beer," with a perfectly negative expression. One might guess she did no harm, and fear she did no good,—that she saved the hire of an upper servant,—that she was an inveterate sewer and cleaner, and would leave the world in time with an epitaph.
On the third figure and face the physiognomist might dwell longer,—but that rather because youth, hope, and inexperience had refused to make any of the life-marks that tell stories in faces. There was abundant room for imagination and prophecy.