e the baby, and
to-morrow they'll both wake up.' And then he'd say, 'If it was only
summer-time! Can't you find some roses? She ought to have her hands
full of roses.'

"And as soon as dark come, he'd have all the wax candles lighted in
the parlor, and they said it made your flesh creep to hear him talkin'
and laughin' with the dead all night long, and the whole room blazin'
with light jest like there was a weddin' goin' on.

"Well, when the third day come, they said the funeral had to be, and
they dug the grave in the family buryin'-ground and cut branches of
cedar and pine and lined it so you couldn't see the frozen earth
anywhere, and they covered the coffin with ivy off the walls o' the
old house. It was one o' these clear, sunshiny winter days, when the
sky's soft and blue jest like it is in May or June, but the air was
bitter cold, and there was a crust of ice on top o' the snow and the
frozen ground under it. Hamilton had got kind o' quiet by this time,
and he was so weak from loss o' sleep and not eatin' anything that
they thought they wouldn't have any more trouble, but when they let
the coffin down into the ground and the first clod fell on it, it took
the strength of three men to keep Hamilton from throwin' himself into
the grave."

Alas, the sad, sad story, beginning with love and spring and youth,
and ending beside an open grave under wintry skies! Aunt Jane was
wiping her glasses, and my tears were flowing fast.

"Death has mighty few terrors when it comes at the right time, honey,"
said Aunt Jane tremulously. "You know the Bible says 'We all do fade
as a leaf; and when a person's lived out his app'inted time, three
score years and ten, or maybe four score, why, his death is jest like
the fallin' of a leaf. It's had its spring and its summer, and it's
nothin' to cry about when the frost comes and touches it, and it falls
to the ground to make room for the new leaves that'll come next
spring. But jest suppose that the leaves fell as soon as the trees got
green and pretty in the springtime, and suppose all the roses died in
the bud. Wouldn't this be a sorrowful world, if things was that way?
There ain't any bitterness in the tears that's shed over old folks'
coffins, but when I think o' Miss Amaryllis dyin' the way she did,
before she'd lived her life and had the happiness she ought to 'a'
had, I feel like questionin' the ways o' Providence. And then, again,
I think maybe she had as much happiness in th