hopeful as she did so, "maybe the woman will be better such a beautiful day, and maybe the husband will come back to make it up and say he's sorry, and sweet content will reign in the humble habitation that was once the scene of poverty, grief, and despair. That's how it came out in a story I'm reading." "I hain't noticed that life comes out like stories very much," responded the pessimistic blacksmith, who, as Rebecca privately thought, had read less than half a dozen books in his long and prosperous career. A drive of three or four miles brought the party to a patch of woodland where many of the tall pines had been hewn the previ ous winter. The roof of a ramshackle hut was outlined against a background of young birches, and a rough path made in hauling the logs to the main road led directly to its door. As they drew near the figure of a woman approached Lizy Ann Dennett in a gingham dress and a calico apron over her head. "Good-morning, Mr. Perkins. I'm real glad you come right over, for she's dead." Dead! The word struck heavily and mysteriously on the children's ears. Dead! and their young lives, just begun, stretched on and on, all decked, like hope, in living green. Dead! and all the rest of the world revelling in strength. Dead! with all the daisies and buttercups waving in the fields and the men heaping the mown grass into fragrant cocks or tossing it into heavily laden carts. Dead! with the brooks tinkling after the summer showers, with the potatoes and corn blossoming, the birds singing for joy and every little insect humming and chirping, adding its note to the blithe chorus of warm, throbbing life. "I was all alone with her. She passed away suddenly just about break o' day," said Lizy Ann Dennett. "Her soul passed upward to its God Just at the break of day." These words came suddenly into Rebecca's mind from a tiny chamber in her head where such things were wont to lie quietly until something brought them to the surface. She was so thrilled with the idea of dying just as the dawn was breaking that she scarcely heard Mrs. Dennett's conversation. here an' laid her out," continued that longsuffering lady. "She ain't got any folks, an' John Winslow ain't never had any as far back as I can remember. She belongs to your town and you'll have to bury her and take care of Jacky-that's the boy. He's seventeen months old, a bright little feller, the image o' John, but I can't keep him another day. I'm all wore out; my own baby's sick, mother's rheumatiz is extry bad, and my husband's comin' home tonight from his week's work. If he finds a child o' John Winslow's under his roof I can't say what would happen; you'll have to take him back with you to the poor-farm.” "I can't get him up there this afternoon," objected Mr. Perkins. "Well, then, keep him over Sunday yourself; he's good as a kitten. John Winslow 'll hear o' Sal's death sooner or later, unless he's gone out o' the State altogether, an' when he knows the boy's at the poorfarm I kind o' think he'll come and claim him. Could you drive me over to the vil lage to see about the coffin, and would you children be afraid to stay here alone for a spell ?" she asked, turning to the girls. "Afraid?" they both echoed, uncomprehendingly. Lizy Ann and Mr. Perkins perceiving that the fear of a dead presence had not entered the minds of Rebecca or Emma Jane, said nothing, but drove off together, counselling them not to stray far away from the cabin and promising to be back in an hour. There was not a house within sight, either looking up or down the shady road, and the two girls stood hand in hand, watching the wagon out of sight; then they sat down quietly under a tree, feeling all at once a nameless depression hanging over their gay summer-morning spirits. It was very still in the woods; just the chirp of a grasshopper now and then, or the note of a bird, of the click of a far-distant mowing-machine. "We're watching'!" whispered Emma Jane. "They 'watched' with Gran'pa Perkins, and there was a great funeral and two ministers." "They watched with my little sister Mira, too," said Rebecca. "You remember when she died, and I went home to Sunnybrook Farm? It was winter time, but she was covered with evergreen and white pinks, "I sent for the undertaker, an' he's be'n and there was singing." Isn't that dreadfu!? But," she continued, her practical common sense coming to the rescue, "you've been in once and it's all over; it won't be so bad when you take in the flowers because you'll be used to it. The golden-rod hasn't begun to bud, so there's nothing to pick but daisies. Shall I make a long rope of them as I did for the schoolroom?" "Yes," said Rebecca, wiping her eyes and still sobbing. "Yes, that's the prettiest, and if we put it all round her like a frame they couldn't be so cruel as to throw it away, even if she is a pauper, because it will look so beautiful. From what the Sunday-school lessons say, she's only asleep now, and when she wakes up she'll be in heaven." "There's another place," said Emma Jane in a sepulchral whisper, as she took her ever-present ball of crochet cotton from her pocket and began to twine the whiteweed blossoms into a rope. "Oh, well!" Rebecca replied with the easy theology that belonged to her temperament. "They simply couldn't send her down there with that little weeny baby. Who'd take care of it? You know page 6 of the catechism says the only companions of the wicked after death are their father the devil and all the other evil angels; it's no place to bring up a baby." "When she wakes up I hope she won't know that the big baby is going to the poorfarm. I wonder where he is?" "Perhaps over to Mrs. Dennett's house. She didn't seem sorry a bit, did she?" "No, but I suppose she's tired sitting up and nursing a stranger. Mother wasn't sorry when Grandpa Perkins died; she couldn't be, for he was cross all the time and had to be fed like a child. Why are you crying again, Rebecca?" "Oh, I don't know, I can't tell, Emma Jane! Only I don't want to die and have no funeral or singing and nobody sorry for me! I just couldn't bear it!" "Neither could I," Emma Jane responded, "but p'r'aps if we're real good and die young before we have to be fed, they will be sorry. I do wish you could write some poetry for her as you did for Alice Robinson's canary-bird, only still better, of course." "I could, easy enough," exclaimed Rebecca, somewhat consoled by the idea that her rhyming faculty could be of any use in VOL. XL.-15 such an emergency. "I don't know but it would be kind of bold to do it. I'm all puzzled about how people get to heaven after they're buried. I cannot understand it a bit; but if the poetry is on her, what if that should go, too? And how could I write anything good enough to be read out loud in heaven?" "A little piece of paper couldn't get to heaven; it just couldn't," asserted Emma Jane decisively. "It would be all blown to pieces and dried up. And nobody knows that the angels can read writing, anyway." "They must be as 'smart' as we are, and smarter," argued Rebecca. "They must be more than just dead people, or else why should they have wings? But I'll go off and write something while you finish the rope; it's lucky you brought your crochet cotton and I my lead-pencil." In fifteen or twenty minutes she returned with some lines written on a scrap of brown wrapping paper. Standing soberly by Emma Jane, she said, preparing to read them aloud: "They're not good; I was afraid your father'd come back before I finished, and the first verse sounds exactly like the funeral hymns in the church book. I couldn't call her Sally Winslow, it didn't seem nice, so I thought if I said 'friend' it would show she had somebody to be sorry. "This friend of ours has died and gone From us to heaven to live. If she has sinned against Thee, Lord, We pray Thee, Lord, forgive. "Her husband runneth far away And knoweth not she's dead. Oh, bring him back-ere 'tis too lateTo mourn beside her bed. "And if perchance it can't be so, "I think that's perfectly elegant!" exclaimed Emma Jane, kissing Rebecca fervently. "You are the smartest girl in the whole State of Maine, and it sounds like a minister's prayer. Shall you sign it like we do our school compositions?" "No," said Rebecca soberly. "I certainly sha'n't sign it; not knowing where it's going or who'll read it. I shall just hide it in the flowers, and whoever finds it will guess that there wasn't any minister or singing, or gravestone or anything, so somebody just did the best they could." III THE tired mother with the "weeny baby" on her arm lay on a long carpenter's bench, her earthly journey over, and when Rebecca stole in and placed the flowery garland all along the edge of the rude bier, death suddenly took on a more gracious and benign aspect. It was only a child's sympathy and intuition that softened the rigors of the sad moment, but poor Sal Winslow, in her frame of daisies, looked as if she were missed a little by an unfriendly world; while the weeny baby, whose heart had fallen asleep almost as soon as it had learned to beat, the weeny baby with Emma Jane's nosegay of buttercups in its tiny hand, smiled as if it might have been loved and longed for and mourned. "We've done all we can now without a minister," whispered Rebecca. "We could sing 'God is ever good' out of the Sundayschool song-book, but I'm afraid somebody would hear us and think we were gay and happy.-What's that?" a A strange sound broke the stillness: gurgle, a yawn, a merry little cry. The two girls ran in the direction from which it came, and there, on an old coat, in a clump of golden-rod bushes, lay a child just waking from a refreshing nap. "It's the other baby!" cried Emma Jane. "Isn't he beautiful!" exclaimed Rebecca. "Come straight to me!" and she stretched out her arms. The child struggled to its feet and tottered waveringly toward the warm welcome of the voice and eyes. Rebecca was all mother and her maternal instincts had been well developed in the large family in which she was next to the eldest. She had always confessed that there were perhaps a trifle too many babies at Sunnybrook Farm, but, nevertheless, had she ever heard it, she would have stood loyally by the Japanese proverb: "Whether brought forth upon the mountain or in the field it matters nothing; more than a treasure of one thousand ryo a baby precious is." You darling thing!" she crooned, as she caught and lifted the child. "You look just like a Jack-o'-lantern." The boy was clad in a yellow cotton dress, very full and stiff. His hair was of such a bright gold, and so sleek and shiny that he looked like a fair, smooth little pumpkin. He had wide blue eyes full of laughter, a neat little vertical nose, a neat little horizontal mouth with his few neat little teeth showing very plainly, and on the whole Rebecca's figure of speech was not so wide of the mark. แ "O Emma Jane! Isn't he too lovely to go to the poor-farm? If only we were married we could keep him and say nothing and nobody would know the difference! Now that the Simpsons have gone there isn't a single baby in Riverboro, and only one in Edgewood. It's a perfect shame, but I can't do anything; you remember Aunt Miranda wouldn't let me have the Simpson baby when I wanted to borrow her just for one rainy Sunday." "My mother won't keep him, so it's no use to ask her; she says 'most every day she's glad we're grown up, and she thanks the Lord there wasn't but two of us." "And Mrs. Peter Meserve is too nervous," Rebecca went on, taking the village houses in turn, "and Mrs. Robinson is too neat." "People don't seem to like any but their own babies," observed Emma Jane. "Well, I can't understand it," Rebecca answered. "A baby's a baby, I should think, whose ever it is! Miss Dearborn is coming back Monday. I wonder if she'd like it? She has nothing to do out of school and we could borrow it all the time!" "I don't think it would seem very genteel for a young lady like Miss Dearborn, who 'boards round,' to take a baby from place to place," objected Emma Jane. "Perhaps not," agreed Rebecca despondently, "but I think if we haven't got anyany-private babies in Riverboro we ought to have one for the town, and all have a share in it. We've got a town hall and a town lamp-post and a town wateringtrough. Things are so uneven! One house like mine at Sunnybrook, brim full of children and the very next one empty! The only way to fix them right would be to let all the babies that ever are belong to all the grown-up people that ever are just divide them up, you know, if they'd go round. Oh, I have a thought! Don't you believe Aunt Sarah Cobb would |