flow for hours, maybe days, and there were just five
echoes to her grief, all done in different keys and characters.

Cousin Martha knelt beside the chair and held Sallie's head on her ample
bosom, but I must say that the expression on her face was one of
bewilderment, as well as of grief.

The three little Horton cousins sat close together in the middle of the
old hair-cloth sofa by the window and were weeping as modestly and
helplessly as they did everything else in life, while Mrs. Hargrove, in
her chair under her son's portrait, was just plainly out and out
howling.

And on the hearth-rug, before the tiny fire of oak chips that the old
ladies liked to keep burning all summer, stood the master of the house
and, for once in my life, I have seen the personification of masculine
helplessness. He was a tragedy and I flew straight to him with arms wide
open, which clasped both his shoulders as I gave him a good shake to
arouse him from his paralyzation.

"What's the matter?" I demanded, with the second shake.

"I'm a brute, Evelina," he answered, and a sudden discouragement lined
every feature of his beautiful biblical face. I couldn't stand that and
I hugged him tight to my breast for an instant and then administered
another earthquake shake.

"Tell me exactly what has happened," I demanded, looking straight into
his tragic eyes and letting my hands slip from his shoulders down his
arms until they held both of his hands tight and warm in mine.

Jane, I was glad that I had offered the cup of my eyes to him full of
this curious inter-sex elixir of life that you have induced me to seek
so blindly, for he responded to the dose immediately and the color came
back into his face as he answered me just as sensibly as he would
another man.

"The men who are surveying the new railroad from Cincinnati to the Gulf
have laid their experimental lines across the corner of Greenwood
Cemetery and they say it will have to run that way or go across the
river and parallel the lines of the other road. If they come on this
side of the river they will force the other road to come across, too,
and in that case we will get the shops. It just happens that such a line
will make necessary the removal of--of poor Henry's remains to another
lot. Sallie's is the only lot in the cemetery that is that high on the
bluff. Henry didn't like the situation when he bought it himself, and I
thought that, as there is another lot right next to her mothe