It is Sunday morning. I should premise by saying that the deep gloom which has settled over everything set in like a heavy fog early on Saturday evening.
At seven o'clock my grandfather comes smilelessly downstairs. He is dressed in black, and looks as if be had lost all his friends during the night.
Miss Abigail, also in black, looks as if she were prepared to bury them, and not indisposed to enjoy the ceremony. Even Kitty Collins has caught the contagious gloom, as I perceive when she brings in the coffee-um-a solemn and sculpturesque urn at any time, but monumental now-and sets it down in front of Miss Abigail. Miss Abigail gazes at the urn as if it held the ashes of her ancestors, instead of a generous quantity of fine old Java coffee. The meal progresses in silence.
Our parlor is by no means thrown open every day. It is open this June morning, and is pervaded by a strong smell of centretable. The furniture of the room, and the little China ornaments on the mantel-piece, have a constrained, unfamiliar look. My grandfather sits in a mahogany chair, reading a large Bible covered with green baize. Miss Abigail occupies one end of the sofa, and has her hands crossed stiffly in her lap. I sit in the comer, crushed. Robinson Crusoe and Gil Blas are in close confinement.
Baron Trenck, who managed to escape from the fortress of Clatz, can't for the life of him get out of our sittingroom closet. Even the Rivermouth Barnacle is suppressed until Monday. Genial converse, harmless books, smiles, lightsome hearts, all are banished. If I want to read anything, I can read Baxter's Saints' Rest. I would die first. So I sit there kicking my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly that attempts to commit suicide by butting his head against the window-pane. Listen!-no, yes-it is-it is the robins singing in the garden-the grateful, joyous robins singing away like mad, just as if it wasn't Sunday. Their audacity tickles me.
My grandfather looks up, and inquires in a sepulchral voice if I am ready for Sabbath school. It is time to go. I like the Sabbath school; there are bright young faces there, at all events. When I get out into the sunshine alone, I draw a long breath; I would turn a somersault up against Neighbor Penhallow's newly painted fence if I hadn't my best trousers on, so glad am I to escape from the oppressive atmosphere of the Nutter House.
Sabbath school over, I go to meeting, joining my grandfather, who doesn't appear to be any relation to me this day, and Miss Abigail, in the porch.
Our minister holds out very little hope to any of us of being saved.
Convinced that I am a lost creature, in common with the human family, I return home behind my guardians at a snail's pace. We have a dead cold dinner. I saw it laid out yesterday.
There is a long interval between this repast and the second service, and a still longer interval between the beginning and the end of that service; for the Rev. Wibird Hawkins's sermons are none of the shortest, whatever else they may be.
After meeting, my grandfather and I take a walk. We visit appropriately enough-a neighboring graveyard. I am by this time in a condition of mind to become a willing inmate of the place. The usual evening prayer-meeting is postponed for some reason. At half past eight I go to bed.
This is the way Sunday was observed in the Nutter House, and pretty generally throughout the town, twenty years ago.1 People who were prosperous and natural and happy on Saturday became the most rueful of human beings in the brief space of twelve hours. I don't think there was any hypocrisy in this. It was merely the old Puritan austerity cropping out once a week. Many of these people were pure Christians every day in the seven-excepting the seventh. Then they were decorous and solemn to the verge of moroseness. I should not like to be misunderstood on this point.
Sunday is a blessed day, and therefore it should not be made a gloomy one.
It is the Lord's day, and I do believe that cheerful hearts and faces are not unpleasant in His sight.
"O day of rest! How beautiful, how fair, How welcome to the weary and the old!
Day of the Lord! and truce to earthly cares!
Day of the Lord, as all our days should be!
Ah, why will man by his austerities Shut out the blessed sunshine and the light, And make of thee a dungeon of despair!"
1 About 1850.
