The gates ajar. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

82 The Gates Ajar.
"Laugh and joke in heaven?"
"Why not?"
"But it seems so-so-why, so wicked
and irreverent and all that, you know."
Just then Faith, who, mounted out on the
kitchen table, was preaching at Phcebe in comical mimicry of Dr. Bland's choicest intonations, laughed out like the splash of a little
wave.
The sound came in at the open door, anrd we
stopped to listen till it had rippled away.
"There! " said her mother, " put that child,
this very minute, with all her little sins forgiven, into one of our dear Lord's many mansions,
and do you suppose that she would be any the
less holy or less reverent for a laugh like that?
Is he going to check all the sparkle and blossom of life when he takes us to himself? I
don't believe any such thing.
"There were both sense and Christianity
in what somebody wrote on the death of a
humorous poet --
Does nobody laugh there, where he has gone, -
This man of the smile and the jest?'
— provided there was any hope that the poor
fellow had gone to heaven; if not, it was bad
philosophy and worse religion.