was gone."

She released me as she finished, and walking straight through the
kitchen and the consoling neighbours, I opened the back door, and
closing it after me, sat down on the single step. I can't remember that
I shed a tear or that I suffered, but I can still see as plainly as if
it were yesterday, the clothes-line stretching across the little yard
and the fluttering, half-dried garments along it. There was a striped
shirt of my father's, a faded blue one of mine, a pink slip of baby
Jessy's, and a patched blue and white gingham apron I had seen only that
morning tied at my mother's waist. Between the high board fence, above
the sunken bricks of the yard, they danced as gayly as if she who had
hung them there was not lying dead in the house. Samuel, trotting from a
sunny corner, crept close to my side, with his warm tongue licking my
hand, and so I sat for an hour watching the flutter of the blue, the
pink, and the striped shirts on the clothes-line.

"There ain't nobody to iron 'em now," I said suddenly to Samuel, and
then I wept.

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH I START IN LIFE

With my mother's death all that was homelike and comfortable passed from
our little house. For three days after the funeral the neglected clothes
still hung on the line in the back yard, but on the fourth morning a
slatternly girl, with red hair and arms, came from the grocery store at
the corner, and gathered them in. My little sister was put to nurse with
Mrs. Cudlip next door, and when, at the end of the week, President went
off to work somewhere in a mining town in West Virginia, my father and I
were left alone, except for the spasmodic appearances of the red-haired
slattern. Gradually the dust began to settle and thicken on the dried
cat-tails in the china vases upon the mantel; the "prize" red geranium
dropped its blossoms and withered upon the sill; the soaking dish-cloths
lay in a sloppy pile on the kitchen floor; and the vegetable rinds were
left carelessly to rot in the bucket beside the sink. The old neatness
and order had departed before the garments my mother had washed were
returned again to the tub, and day after day I saw my father shake his
head dismally over the soggy bread and the underdone beef. Whether or
not he ever realised that it was my mother's hand that had kept him
above the surface of life, I shall never know; but when that strong
grasp was relaxed, he went hopelessly, irretrievably, and unresistingly
under