to his “Parish,” as he called “The Cedars.”  They had often been with him there; and Mercy had been for a long time secretly hoping that he would ask her to help him in teaching the negroes.  The day was one of those radiant and crystalline days peculiar to the New England autumn.  On such days, joy becomes inevitable even to inert and lifeless natures:  to enthusiastic and spontaneous ones, the exhilaration of the air and the sun is as intoxicating as wine.  Mercy was in one of her most mirthful moods.  She frolicked with the negro children, and decked their little woolly heads with wreaths of golden-rod, till they looked as fantastic as dancing monkeys.  She gathered great sheaves of ferns and blue gentians and asters, until the Parson implored her to “leave a few just for the poor sun to shine on.”  The paths winding among “The Cedars” were in some places thick-set with white eupatoriums, which were now in full, feathery flower, some of them so old that, as you brushed past them, a cloud of the fine thread-like petals flew in all directions.  Mercy gathered branch after branch of these, but threw them away impatiently, as the flowers fell off, leaving the stems bare.

“Oh, dear!” she exclaimed.  “Nature wants some seeds, I suppose; but I want flowers.  What becomes of the poor flower, any way? it lives such a short while; all its beauty and grace sacrificed to the making of a seed for next year.”

“That’s the way with every thing in life, dear child,” said Parson Dorrance.  “The thing that shall be is the thing for which all the powers of nature are at work.  We, you and Lizzy and I, will drop off our stems presently,—­I, a good deal the first, for you and Lizzy have the blessing of youth, but I am old.”

“You are not old!  You are the youngest person I know,” exclaimed Mercy, impetuously.  “You will never be old, Mr. Dorrance, not if you should live to be as old as—­as old as the Wandering Jew!”

Mercy’s eyes were fixed intently on the Parson’s face; but she did not note the deep flush which rose to his very hair, as she said these words.  She was thinking only of the glorious soul, and seeing only its shining through the outer tabernacle.  Lizzy Hunter, however, saw the flush, and knew what it meant, and her heart gave a leap of joy.  “Now he can see that Mercy never thinks of him as an old man, and never would,” she thought to herself; and while her hands were idly playing with her flowers and mosses, and her face looked as innocent and care-free as a baby’s, her brain was weaving plots of the most complicated devices for hastening on the future which began to look to her so assured for these two.

They were sitting on a mossy mound in the shadow of great cedar-trees.  The fields around “The Cedars” were filled with low mounds, like velvet cushions:  some of them were merely a mat of moss over great rocks; some of them were soft yielding masses of moss, low cornel, blueberry-bushes, wintergreen, blackberry-vines, and sweet ferns; dainty, fragrant, crowded ovals, lovelier than any florist could ever make; white and green in the spring, when the cornels were in flower; scarlet and green and blue in the autumn, when the cornels and the blueberries were in fruit.