y-house, where to sweet music and amid
flowers the hero told the heroine that he would die for her. She replied
that it must be pretty, but that a book which she had read told her that
it was wrong to go to such a place. In this book there was a girl, and
one night she went with a young man to a theatre and when she came back
her mother was dead. Tom suggested that possibly the old lady might have
died anyway, but Lou shook her wavy hair till all sorts of witcheries
fell out of it.

"No, she died because the girl went, and I have thought I'd be afraid to
go as long as my mother was alive."

He helped her across the rivulet, though it was not more than a foot
wide at this place, and a little further on, helped her across again
when there was no necessity for it. "It didn't seem to have any
influence on the old man, did it?" he remarked.

"The girl goin' to the theatre? Oh, no; it takes more than that to kill
a man. Cousin Jim says when he went down to Memphis while the yeller
fever was there, he saw the theatre house. He went inside, and the seats
were red and soft--softer than the seats in a church, but there wasn't
anybody there for all the people that went there were dead with the
fever. But I have often wondered if there was so much music and so many
flowers how it could be so bad. They say that the angels have harps and
that in heaven there is music, but I haven't heard that there is any
music at the other place. Oh, did you see that bird almost light on me?"

"Thought you were a flower," Tom replied, helping her across the rivulet
again.

"Oh, it didn't. What makes you wanter talk that way for? Look, here is
where I used to make my play-house, and here are pieces of the broken
dishes yet, and that broken bottle was my bureau. Wait a minute and let
me think. There was a little boy played with me and his name was
Bud--not a sure enough little boy, but one that I pretended like; and I
could hear him talk and he'd say the prettiest things. He lived up there
under that big rock and would always come when I called him, but one
time a woman come along and she heard me talkin' to him and she couldn't
see him with her sort of eyes; and she went down to the house and told
mother that I must be crazy, and after this Bud wouldn't come when I
called him. That was a long time ago--a year and a half befo' year befo'
last. We will go on now."

When they came to the log hut, Tom cried out: "Oh, here is another
play-house. Is