The first sermon she heard there was called "Faith answers life." It was such a comfort to hear Dr. Gardner talk about Billy Hicks who had to go to the ship's loft, the lookout tower of a ship at war, to send the signals. He was overwhelmed with fear too. Guns were going off all around him. When another neighbor ship saw signals coming, they were highly mystified. For Billy Hicks was signaling to God, "Please, God, this is Billy Hicks. I've never been up here before, and I'm afraid. Make everything all right!"

She felt much better. She was up in that choir loft, and she was sending my signals too. God gave her the confidence she needed when she sang alone, without the choir.

This Easter, Mommy will sing at the Maryland Presbyterian Church in Loch Raven. It was the Laird family's white house before. We were in it my last Christmas on earth together, in the living room. Easter is on April 6, this year, in 1958.

On Holy Thursday, 1957, Mommy stopped to look in a bakery window. There was an Easter cake, a hen made of cake with fluted icing, all yellow with red cockles. It was like a drawing I made of a toy hen I had that dropped eggs out of her side, little oval red eggs, and cackled when the crank was turned, and she laid the little egg.

As she stood there, several little girls of about ten or eleven years of age looked at the cake and exclaimed over it. They were dressed in long white, filmy dresses with dark coats thrown over-communion dresses. One little girl had long dark hair, and they all carried red roses.

Mommy thought about William Blake's "Holy Thursday," from his Songs of Innocence, and how beautifully he described children at Eastertime service.

'Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces

clean,

The children walking two and two in red and blue

and green.

Gray headed beadles walk'd before with wands as

white as snow,

Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames'

waters flow.

O what a multitude they seem'd, these flowers of

London Town!

Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their

own.

The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes

of lambs,

Thousands of little boys and girls, raising their

innocent hands.

Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the

voice of song,

Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven

among.,

Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of

the poor,

Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from

your door.(8)

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