big door and a handsome steeple. The inside is very beautiful, I'm told. I've been invited to the dedication, and I'll go, if I'm still around and still up to that sort of thing. God willing, in other words. I'd like to see our new church, but they're right, I'd hate to see the old one come down. I believe seeing that might actually kill me, which would not be such a terrible thing for a person in my circumstances. A stab of grief as coup de grace—
there'd be poetry in it.
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Am I impatient? Can that be? Today there has been no hint of a thorn in my flesh, of a thorn in my heart, more particularly. The thump in my chest goes on and on like some old cow chewing her cud, that same dull endlessness and contentment, so it seems to me. I wake up at night, and I hear it. Again, it says. Again, again, again. "For Preservation is a Creation, and more, it is a continued Creation, and a Creation ever}r moment." That is George Herbert, whom I hope you have read.
Again, all any heart has ever said, and just as the word is said the moment is gone, so there is not even any sort of promise in it.
Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praise thy Name: That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease. Yet awhile.
Well, if Herbert is right, this old body is as new a creation as you are yourself. I mean as you are now, playing under my window on the swing Dan Boughton put up for you. You must remember it. He tied fishing line to an arrow and shot it over the bough and then used the fishing line to hoist the rope, and so on. It took him the whole day, but he did it. He's a clever, good-hearted young fellow. He was a great comfort to his father and mother. Now he's teaching school somewhere in Michigan, I'm told. He didn't choose the ministry, though for a long time he was expected to.
You are standing up on the seat of your swing and sailing higher than you really ought to, with that bold, planted stance of a sailor on a billowy sea. The ropes are long and you are 1 1 1
light and the ropes bowlike cobwebs, laggardly, indolent. Your shirt is red—it is your favorite shirt—and you fly into the sunlight and pause there brilliantly for a second and then fall back
into the shadows again. You appear to be altogether happy. I remember those first experiments with fundamental things, gravity and light, and what an absolute pleasure they were. And there is your mother. "Don't go so high," she says. You'll mind. You're a good fellow.
I did not mean to criticize the trustees. I do understand the reluctance to make any substantial investment in the church
building at this point. But if I were a little younger, I tell you, I'd be up on that roof myself. As it is, I might drive a few nails into the treads on the front steps. I don't see the point in letting the old place look too shabby in its last year or so. It's very plain, but the proportions of it really are quite pleasing, and when it has a fresh coat of paint, it's all the church anyone could need, in terms of appearance. It is inadequate in other ways, I recognize that.
I did remember to mention to them that that weather vane on the steeple was brought from Maine by my grandfather and stood above his church for many years. He gave it to my father on the day of his ordination. The people in Maine used to put those roosters on their steeples, he told me, to remind themselves of the betrayal of Peter, to help them repent. They really
didn't use crosses much at all in those days. But once I mentioned that there was a rooster on the steeple, which most of them had never noticed before, they became a little uneasy with the fact that there wasn't a cross up there. I believe they will put one up, now that it's on their minds. That's the one thing they'll get around to. They said they will mount the weather vane on a wall somewhere, in the foyer,"
probably,
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where people can appreciate it. I don't care what they do. I only mentioned it at all because I didn't want it to be discarded with everything else. It is very old. This way at least you can get a good look at it.
It has a bullet hole at the base of its tail feathers. There were a good many stories about how it got there. I was told
once that, since my grandfather had no bell or any other respectable way to call a meeting, and almost nobody had a
working timepiece, he would fire a rifle in the air, and one time he wasn't paying enough attention where he pointed it. There was a story, too, that a man from Missouri who was passing by just as the people were gathering fired one shot and set
the rooster spinning around to try to dishearten them a little, since he knew they were Free Soilers. And there was a story that the church had taken delivery of a crate of Sharps rifles and somebody wanted to find out if they were really as accurate as they were said to be.
