matters is (p.
40, post),--

When I arrived she was cooking supper for some half a dozen people,
while her really pretty boy, who lay kicking furiously in his
champagne-basket cradle, and screaming with a six-months-old-baby
power, had, that day, completed just two weeks of his earthly
pilgrimage.... He is an astonishingly large and strong child, holds
his head up like a six-monther, and has but one failing,--a too
evident and officious desire to inform everybody, far and near, at
all hours of the night and day, that his lungs are in a perfectly
sound and healthy condition.

Dr. Royce (p. 347) tells of the funeral of one of the four women
residing at Rich Bar at the time of Shirley's arrival, which was only a
few days prior to the death, and they had not met. The funeral service
was held at the log-cabin residence, which had "one large opening in
the wall to admit light." The "large opening" was not, in the first
intention, to admit light. Shirley says (post, p. 70),--

It has no window, all the light admitted entering through an
aperture where there _will_ be a door when it becomes cold enough
for such a luxury.

Describing the service, the Doctor says, in part,--

After a long and wandering impromptu prayer by somebody, a prayer
which "Shirley" found disagreeable (since she herself was a
churchwoman, and missed the burial service), the procession,
containing twenty men and three women, set out.

Shirley was not, at that time, a churchwoman, and her account of the
prayer, etc., is,--

About twenty men, with the three women of the place, had assembled
at the funeral. An extempore prayer was made, filled with all the
peculiarities usual to that style of petition. Ah, how different
from the soothing verses of the glorious burial service of the
church!

It may not be inappropriate here to note that the baby referred to in
the two immediately preceding pages is none other than the original of
The Luck in Bret Harte's Luck of Roaring Camp. How the funeral scene as
described by Shirley was adapted by this master of short-story writing,
and how skillfully he combined it with the birth of The Luck, may be
perceived in the two paragraphs following.

[Shirley, post, p. 70.] On a board, supported by two butter-tubs,
was extended the body of the dead woman, covered with a sheet. By
its side stood the coffin, of unstained pine