Sunday morning was a pause and rest and hush of beauty and joy. They
sat--Delight and Leslie--by their open window, where the smell of the
lately harvested hay came over from the wide, sunshiny entrance of the
great barn, and away beyond stretched the pine woods, and the hills
swelled near in dusky evergreen, and indigo shadows, and lessened far
down toward Winnipiseogee, to where, faint and tender and blue, the
outline of little Ossipee peeped in between great shoulders so
modestly,--seen only through the clearest air on days like this.
Leslie's little table, with fresh white cover, held a vase of ferns
and white convolvulus and beside this Cousin Delight's two books that
came out always from the top of her trunk,--her Bible and her little
"Daily Food." To-day the verses from Old and New Testaments were
these:--"The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and he
delighteth in his way." "Walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as
wise, redeeming the time."

They had a talk about the first,--"The steps,"--the little
details,--not merely the general trend and final issue; if, indeed,
these could be directed without the other.

"You always make me see things, Cousin Delight," Leslie said.

"It is very plain," Delight answered; "if people only would read the
Bible as they read even a careless letter from a friend, counting each
word of value, and searching for more meaning and fresh inference to
draw out the most. One word often answers great doubts and askings
that have troubled the world."

Afterward, they walked round by a still wood-path under the Ledge to