family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it
now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough. Another was
Friendship's Offering, full of beautiful stuff and poetry; but I didn't
read the poetry. Another was Henry Clay's Speeches, and another was Dr.
Gunn's Family Medicine, which told you all about what to do if a body was
sick or dead. There was a hymn book, and a lot of other books. And
there was nice split-bottom chairs, and perfectly sound, too--not bagged
down in the middle and busted, like an old basket.
They had pictures hung on the walls--mainly Washingtons and Lafayettes,
and battles, and Highland Marys, and one called "Signing the
Declaration." There was some that they called crayons, which one of the
daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen
years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before
--blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress,
belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle
of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil,
and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black
slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on
her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down
her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the
picture it said "Shall I Never See Thee More Alas." Another one was a
young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head,
and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was
crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her
other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said "I Shall
Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas." There was one where a young
lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her
cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing wax
showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain to
it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said "And Art Thou
Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas." These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but
I didn't somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a
little they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she died,
because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body
could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned that
with
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