d a little. It was safer.

"Aunt Olivia isn't at home and I'm glad. She doesn't care. Perhaps she
would laugh. Oh, I know," appealed Rebecca Mary, piteously, "I know
he's a rooster! It isn't because I don't know--but he's FOLKS to me! You
needn't do anything but just smooth his feathers a little and say the
Lord bless you. I thought perhaps you'd come and do that. _I_ could, but
I wanted you to, because you're a minister. I thought--I thought perhaps
you'd try and forget he's a rooster."

"I will," the minister said, gently. Now his lips were quite grave. He
took Rebecca Mary's hand and went with her.

"He's a good man," murmured the minister's wife, watching them go. She
had known he would go.

"He was one of my parishioners," the minister was saying for the
comforting of Rebecca Mary. Unconsciously he used the past tense, as
one speaks of those close to death. It was well enough, for already big,
gaunt, white Thomas Jefferson was in the past tense.

Rebecca Mary chronicled the sad event in her diary:

"Tomas Jefferson passed away at ten minutes of three this afternoon
blessed are them that die in the Lord. The minnister did not get here in
time. I wish I had asked him to run for he is a very good minnister and
would have. He helped me berry him in the cold cold ground and we sang a
him. I dident ask him to pray because he was only a rooster, but he
was folks to me. I loved him. It is very lonesome. I dred wakening up
tomorrow because he always crowed under my window. The Lord gaveth and
the Lord has taken away."

This last Rebecca Mary erased once, but she wrote it again after a
moment's thought. For, she reasoned, it was the Lord part of Aunt Olivia
which had given Thomas Jefferson to her. In the primitive little creed
of Rebecca Mary every one had a Lord part, but some people's was very
small. Not Aunt Olivia's--she had never gauged Aunt Olivia's Lord part;
it would not have been consistent with her ideas of loyalty.

It was very lonely, as Rebecca Mary had known it would be. At best
her life had never been overfull of companionships, and the sudden
taking-off--it seemed sudden, as all deaths do--of Thomas Jefferson was
hard to bear. Strange how blank a space one great, white rooster can
leave behind him!

The yard and the orchard seemed full of blank spaces, though in a way
Thomas Jefferson's soul seemed to frequent his old beloved haunts.
Rebecca Mary could not see it pecking daintily about, but she felt