husband and friends came to take a final look at the rigid
form and ashen face before it was laid away forever in the ground. The
old mother sat on the mat-covered ground beside her child, brushing
away the intrusive flies with a piece of cocoanut-leaf, and wiping
away the tears that slowly rolled down her cheeks. Now and then she
would break into a low, heart-rending wail, and tell in a sob-choked,
broken voice, how good this her child had always been to her, how her
husband loved her, and how her children would never have any one to
take her place. "Oh, why," she cried, "did the gods leave me? I am old
and heavy with years; my back is bent and my eyes are getting dark. I
cannot work, and am too old and weak to enjoy fishing in the sea,
or dancing and feasting under the trees. But this my child loved all
these things, and was so happy. Why is she taken and I, so useless,
left?" And again that mournful, sob-choked wail broke on the still
air, and was borne out to the friends gathered under the trees before
the door, and was taken up and repeated until the hardest heart would
have softened and melted at the sound. As they sat around on the mats
looking at their dead and listening to the old mother, suddenly Kalima
moved, took a long breath, and opened her eyes. They were frightened
at the miracle, but so happy to have her back again among them.

The old mother raised her hands and eyes to heaven and, with rapt
faith on her brown, wrinkled face, exclaimed: "The gods have let her
come back! How they must love her!"

Mother, husband, and friends gathered around and rubbed her hands
and feet, and did what they could for her comfort. In a few minutes
she revived enough to say, "I have something strange to tell you."

Several days passed before she was strong enough to say more; then
calling her relatives and friends about her, she told them the
following weird and strange story:

"I died, as you know. I seemed to leave my body and stand beside it,
looking down on what _was_ me. The me that was standing there looked
like the form I was looking at, only, I was alive and the other was
dead. I gazed at my body for a few minutes, then turned and walked
away. I left the house and village, and walked on and on to the next
village, and there I found crowds of people,--Oh, so many people! The
place which I knew as a small village of a few houses was a very
large place, with hundreds of houses and thousands of men, women,
and chil