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“Will he dine with you to-day?”

“I am afraid not; but we shall see him at the Christmas-tree after dinner. There is to be a tree.”

You see, this house was dedicated to the Apotheosis of Noble Ministry. Over the mantel-piece hung Raphael Morghen’s large print of “The Lavatio,” Caracci’s picture of “The Washing of the Feet,”–the only copy I ever saw. We asked Huldah about it.

“Oh, that was a present from Mr. Burchstadt, a rich manufacturer in Wuertemberg, to Ellen. She stumbled into one of those villages when everybody was sick and dying of typhus, and tended and watched and saved, one whole summer long, as Mrs. Ware did at Osmotherly. And this Mr. Burchstadt wanted to do something, and he sent her this in acknowledgment.”

On the other side was Kaulbach’s own study of Elizabeth of Hungary, dropping her apron full of roses.

“Oh! what a sight the apron discloses;
The viands are changed to real roses!”

When I asked Huldah where that came from, she blushed, and said, “Oh, that was a present to me!” and led us to Steinler’s exquisite “Good Shepherd,” in a larger and finer print than I had ever seen. Six or eight gentlemen in New York, who, when they were dirty babies from the gutter, had been in Helen Touro’s hands, had sent her a portfolio of beautiful prints, each with this same idea, of seeking what was lost. This one she had chosen for the sitting-room.

And, on the fourth side, was that dashing group of Horace Vernet’s, “Gideon crossing Jordan,” with the motto wrought into the frame, “Faint, yet pursuing.” These four pictures are all presents to the “girls,” as I find I still call them; and, on the easel, Miss Peters had put her copy of “The Tribute Money.” There were other pictures in the room; but these five unconsciously told its story.

The five “girls” were always all together at Christmas; but, in practice, each of them lived here only two-fifths of her time. “We make that a rule,” said Ellen laughing. “If anybody comes for anybody when there are only two here, those two are engaged to each other; and we stay. Not but what they can come and stay here if we cannot go to them.” In practice, if any of us in the immense circles which these saints had befriended were in a scrape,–as, if a mother was called away from home, and there were some children left, or if scarlet fever got into a house, or if the children had nobody to go to Mt. Desert with them, or if the new house were to be set in order, and nobody knew how,–in any of the trials of well-ordered families, why, we rode over to the Saints’ Rest to see if we could not induce one of the five to come and put things through. So that, in practice, there were seldom more than two on the spot there.

But we do not get to the Christmas dinner. There were covers for four and twenty; and all the children besides were in a room upstairs, presided over by Maria Munro, who was in her element there. Then our party of twenty-four included men and women of a thousand romances, who had learned and had shown the nobility of service. One or two of us were invited as novices, in the hope perhaps that we might learn.

Scarcely was the soup served when the door-bell rang. Nothing else ever made Huldah look nervous. Bartlett, who was there, said in an aside to me, that he had seen her more calm when there was volley firing within hearing of her store-room. Then it rang again. Helen Touro talked more vehemently; and Mrs. Bartlett at her end, started a great laugh. But, when it rang the third time, something had to be said; and Huldah asked one of the girls, who was waiting, if there were no one attending at the door.