said, "dear friends ..." And then, "Lord God," he
prayed abruptly, "show me what is that in my hand--thy tool where I had
looked for my sword!"

XVII

PUT ON THY BEAUTIFUL GARMENTS

"I donno," Calliope said, as, on her return, we talked about Ellen
Ember, "I guess I kind o' believe in craziness."

Calliope's laugh often made me think of a bluebird's note, which is to
say, of the laughter of a child. Bluebirds are the little children among
birds, as robins are the men, house-wrens the women, scarlet tanagers
the unrealities and humming-birds the fairies.

"Only," Calliope added, "I do say you'd ought to hev some sort o'
leadin' strap even to craziness, an' that I ain't got an' never had. I
guess folks thinks I'm rill lunar when I take the notion. Only thing
comforts me, they don't know how lunar I rilly can be."

Then she told me about 'Leven.

"A shroud, to look rill nice," Calliope said, "ought to be made as much
as you can like a dress--barrin' t' you can't fit it. Mis' Toplady an'
Mis' Holcomb an' I made Jennie Crapwell's shroud--it was white mull and
a little narrow lace edge on a rill life-like collar. We finished it the
noon o' the day after Jennie died,--you know Jennie was Delia's
stepsister that they'd run away from--an' I brought it over to my house
an' pressed it an' laid it on the back bedroom bed--the room I don't use
excep' for company an' hang my clean dresses in the closet of.

"In the afternoon I went up to the City on a few little funeral
urrants,--a crape veil for Jennie's mother an' like that,--you know
Jennie died first. We wasn't goin' to dress her till the next
mornin'--her mother wanted we should leave her till then in her little
pink sacque she'd wore, an' the soft lavender cloth they use now spread
over her careless. An' we wanted to, too, because sence Mis' Jeweler
Sprague died nobody could do up the Dead's hair, an' Jennie wa'n't the
exception.

"Mis' Sprague, she'd hed a rill gift that way. She always done folks'
hair when they died an' she always got it like life--she owned up how,
after she begun doin' it so much, she used to set in church an' in
gatherin's and find herself lookin' at the backs of heads to see if they
was two puffs or three, an' whether the twist was under to left or over
to right--so's she'd know, if the time come. But none of us could get
Jennie's to look right. We studied her pictures an' all too, but best we
could do we got it all drawed back, abnorm