Every smell known to the nostrils of man was abroad in
the air, and several were floating about waiting modestly to be
classified, after which they intended to come to the front and outdo the
others if they could.
That was Minerva Court! A little piece of your world, my world, God's
world (and the Devil's), lying peacefully fallow, awaiting the services
of some inspired Home Missionary Society.
In a front room of Number Three, a dilapidated house next the corner,
there lay a still, white shape, with two women watching by it.
A sheet covered it. Candles burned at the head, striving to throw a
gleam of light on a dead face that for many a year had never been
illuminated from within by the brightness of self-forgetting love or
kindly sympathy. If you had raised the sheet, you would have seen no
happy smile as of a half-remembered, innocent childhood; the smile--is
it of peaceful memory or serene anticipation?--that sometimes shines on
the faces of the dead.
Such life-secrets as were exposed by Death, and written on that still
countenance in characters that all might read, were painful ones. Flossy
Morrison was dead. The name "Flossy" was a relic of what she termed her
better days (Heaven save the mark!), for she had been called Mrs.
Morrison of late years,--"Mrs. F. Morrison," who took "children to
board, and no questions asked"--nor answered. She had lived forty-five
years, as men reckon summers and winters; but she had never learned, in
all that time, to know her Mother, Nature, her Father, God, nor her
brothers and sisters, the children of the world.
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