Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/54

30 to meeting; don't you go Susie, not to their meeting, but come with me this morning to the church within our hearts, where the bells are always ringing and the preacher whose name is Love shall intercede for us. They will all go but me—to the usual meeting house, to hear the usual sermon, the inclemency of a storm so kindly detaining me.

But life had other diversions than church-going that first summer after Emily left South Hadley, and even the grim funerals of the remoter branches of the Dickinsons had a silver lining for her guilty satisfaction. One of her most madcap escapades occurred one lovely afternoon when, after being driven decorously to the burial of some unknown kinswoman in old Hadley, Emily ran from the open grave with her favorite cousin, a rather dashing young beau from Worcester—connived at his taking her home the long way round through Sunderland, full seven miles in the wrong direction, via his shining buggy and fast black horse, so fast, in fact, that when her parents and retribution caught up with her, she had capped her infamy by being securely locked in her own room at home. Perhaps to-day it does not sound so very rash and unforgivable—the gay young cousin, the joy of motion, and the seductive beguilement of the sunshine beneath the lacy elms full of bird-songs may plead for the culprit—but before the eyes of her immediate connections it was a misdemeanor at a scene of decent burial quite beyond imagination, and leading to untoward fears for her future state. She was wept over by her mother and ignored quite conspicuously by her father, who saw doom for her plainly; but her spirit was about as easy to chasten as a dawn. As well correct the bobolink for his madrigal or the meadow grass for bowing in the breeze! And so the incident was closed without