We, with our added culture and our maturer artistic perceptions, may smile at a Jacob's Ladder formed according to the domestic architecture of the first half of the nineteenth century; but the people to whom the other world was so near and so real that they perceived nothing incongruous in an ordinary stair-carpet which was being trodden by the feet of angels, had grasped a truth which on one side touched the divine, even though on the other it came perilously near to the grotesque.

And He, Who taught them as by parables, never misunderstood--as did certain of His followers--their reverent irreverence; but, understanding it, saw that it was good.
The great day in East Lane Chapel was the Sunday School anniversary; and in Elisabeth's childish eyes this was a feast compared with which Christmas and Easter sank to the level of black-letter days.

On these festivals the Sunday School scholars sat all together in those parts of the gallery adjacent to the organ, the girls wearing white frocks and blue neckerchiefs, and the boys black suits and blue ties.

The pews were strewn with white hymn-sheets, which lay all over the chapel like snow in Salmon, and which contained special spiritual songs more stirring in their character than the contents of the Hymn-book; these hymns the Sunday School children sang by themselves, while the congregation sat swaying to and fro to the tune.

And Elisabeth's soul was uplifted within her as she listened to the children's voices; for she felt that mystical hush which--let us hope--comes to us all at some time or other, when we hide our faces in our mantles and feel that a Presence is passing by, and is passing by so near to us that we have only to stretch out our hands in order to touch it.