rmured to myself as I again fell dead between the
posts of the ancestral bed.

The next morning I awoke to a new world--or rather I turned straight about
and went back into my own proper scheme of existence. At the crack of dawn
I wakened and set my muscles for the spring from my pillows, then I
stretched my arms, yawned, snuggled my cheek into those same pillows, and
deliberately went to sleep, covering up my head with the old embroidered
counter-pane to shut out from my ears a clarion crow from beyond my
windows. When I next became conscious old Rufus' woolly head was peering
anxiously into my room door, and I judged from the length of the shadows
that the sun cast from the windows that it must be after ten o'clock.

"Am you sick?" he inquired with belligerent solicitude.

"No, Rufus, and I'm going back to sleep. Call me in time to have dinner
with father and Uncle Cradd," I answered as I again burrowed into the
pillows.

"I give that there rooster and family a bucket of feed," said Rufus
begrudgingly, and he stood as if waiting to be praised for thus burying the
hatchet that he had been mentally brandishing over the neck of the enemy.

I made no response, but stretched my tired limbs out between the silky old
sheets and again lost consciousness.

The next time I became intelligent it was when Polly's soft arm was slid
under my neck and her red lips applied to my cheek.

"Miss Ann, are you ill?" she questioned frantically. "Mr. Matthew and I
have been here for hours and have fed and attended to everything. He made
me come up because he was afraid you might be dead."

"I am, Polly, and now watch me come back to life," I said as I sat up and
blinked at the sun coming in through the western window, thus proclaiming
the time as full afternoon.

"We found Mr. G. Bird and all of the other--" Polly was beginning to say
when I cut her short.

"Polly, dear, please go tell Matthew to ride down to the bank and telephone
Bess that I'm coming in to stay a week with her and to invite Belle and
Owen and the rest to dinner. By the time he gets back I'll be ready to go."
As I spoke I threw the sheet from me and started to arise, take up my life,
and walk.

"But who'll attend to the chickens and--" Polly fairly gasped.

"I don't know and I don't care, and if you want to go in to dinner with us,
Polly, you had better hurry on, for you'll have to beg your mother hard," I
said, and at the suggestion Polly fairly flew.

I do