d as we are, and more so, too," agreed Rebecca.
"They must be more than just dead people, or else why should they have
wings? But I'll go off and write something while you finish the rope;
it's lucky you brought your crochet cotton and I my lead pencil."

In fifteen or twenty minutes she returned with some lines written on a
scrap of brown wrapping paper. Standing soberly by Emma Jane, she said,
preparing to read them aloud: "They're not good; I was afraid your
father'd come back before I finished, and the first verse sounds exactly
like the funeral hymns in the church book. I couldn't call her Sally
Winslow; it didn't seem nice when I didn't know her and she is dead, so
I thought if I said friend' it would show she had somebody to be sorry.

"This friend of ours has died and gone
From us to heaven to live.
If she has sinned against Thee, Lord,
We pray Thee, Lord, forgive.

"Her husband runneth far away
And knoweth not she's dead.
Oh, bring him back--ere tis too late--
To mourn beside her bed.

"And if perchance it can't be so,
Be to the children kind;
The weeny one that goes with her,
The other left behind."

"I think that's perfectly elegant!" exclaimed Emma Jane, kissing Rebecca
fervently. "You are the smartest girl in the whole State of Maine, and
it sounds like a minister's prayer. I wish we could save up and buy a
printing machine. Then I could learn to print what you write and we'd
be partners like father and Bill Moses. Shall you sign it with your name
like we do our school compositions?"

"No," said Rebecca soberly. "I certainly shan't sign it, not knowing
where it's going or who'll read it. I shall just hide it in the flowers,
and whoever finds it will guess that there wasn't any minister or
singing, or gravestone, or anything, so somebody just did the best they
could."

III

The tired mother with the "weeny baby" on her arm lay on a long
carpenter's bench, her earthly journey over, and when Rebecca stole
in and placed the flowery garland all along the edge of the rude bier,
death suddenly took on a more gracious and benign aspect. It was only
a child's sympathy and intuition that softened the rigors of the sad
moment, but poor, wild Sal Winslow, in her frame of daisies, looked
as if she were missed a little by an unfriendly world; while the weeny
baby, whose heart had fallen asleep almost as soon as it had learned to
beat, the weeny b