wore falsely, avowing, "may the Devil take me if I cheated."

She boasted of my pioneer ancestors ... strapping six-footers in their
stocking feet ... men who carried one hundred pound bags of salt from
Pittsburgh to Slippery Rock in a single journey.

The effect of these stories on me--?

I dreamed of skeleton hands that reached out from the clothes closet for
me. Often at night I woke, yelling with nightmare.

With a curious touch of folk lore Granma Gregory advised me to "look for
the harness under the bed, if it was a nightmare." But she upbraided
Granma Wandon, her mother, for retailing me such tales.

"Nonsense, it'll do him good, my sweet little Johnnie," she assured her
daughter, knocking her corncob pipe over the coal scuttle like a man.

* * * * *

There was a story of Granma Wandon's that cut deep into my memory. It
was the story of the man who died cursing God, and who brought, by his
cursing, the dancing of the very flames of Hell, red-licking and
serrate, in a hideous cluster, like an infernal bed of flowers, just
outside the window, for all around his death-bed to see!

In the fall of the next year Granma Wandon took sick. We knew it was
all over for her. She faded painlessly into death. She knew she was
going, said so calmly and happily. She made Millie and Granma Gregory
promise they'd be good to me. I wept and wept. I kissed her leathery,
leaf-like hand with utter devotion ... she could hardly lift it. Almost
of itself it sought my face and flickered there for a moment.

* * * * *

She seemed to be listening to something far off.

"Can't you hear it, Maggie?" she asked her daughter.

"Hear what, mother?"

"Music ... that beautiful music!"

"Do you see anything, mother?"

"Yes ... heaven!"

Then the fine old pioneer soul passed on. I'll bet she still clings
grimly to an astral corncob pipe somewhere in space.

* * * * *

A week before she died, Aunt Millie told us she was sure the end was
near. For Millie had waked up in the night and had seen the old lady
come into her room, reach under the bed, take the pot forth, use
it,--and glide silently upstairs to her room again.

Millie spoke to the figure and received no answer. Then, frightened, she
knew she had seen a "token" of Granma Wandon's approaching death.

* * * * *

In the parlour stood the black coffin