e was a
soldier bold," and she sang them to suit herself, and cried every
single minute:

"They wrapped him in his uniform,
They laid him in the tomb,
My aching heart I thought 'twould break,
But such was my sad doom."

Candace just loved that song. She sang it all the time. Leon said our
pie always tasted salty from her tears, and he'd take a bite and smile
at her sweetly and say: "How UNIFORM you get your pie, Candace!"

May's favourite was "Joy Bells." Father would be whispering over to
himself the speech he was preparing to make at the next prayer-meeting.
We never could learn his speeches, because he read and studied so much
it kept his head so full, he made a new one every time. You could hear
Laddie's deep bass booming the "Bedouin Love Song" for a mile; this
minute it came rolling across the corn:

"Open the door of thy heart,
And open thy chamber door,
And my kisses shall teach thy lips
The love that shall fade no more
Till the sun grows cold,
And the Stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment
Book unfold!"

I don't know how the Princess stood it. If he had been singing that
song where I could hear it and I had known it was about me, as she must
have known he meant her, I couldn't have kept my arms from around his
neck. Over in the barn Leon was singing:

"A life on the ocean wave,
A home on the rolling deep,
Where codfish waggle their tails
'Mid tadpoles two feet deep."

The minute he finished, he would begin reciting "Marco Bozzaris," and
you could be sure that he would reach the last line only to commence on
the speech of "Logan, Chief of the Mingoes," or any one of the fifty
others. He could make your hair stand a little straighter than any one
else; the best teachers we ever had, or even Laddie, couldn't make you
shivery and creepy as he could. Because all of us kept going like that
every day, people couldn't pass without hearing, so THAT was what Mr.
Pryor meant.

I had a pulpit in the southeast corner of the orchard. I liked that
place best of all because from it you could see two sides at once. The
very first little, old log cabin that had been on our land, the one my
father and mother moved into, had stood in that corner. It was all
gone now; but a flowerbed of tiny, purple iris, not so tall as the
grass, spread there, and some striped grass in the shadiest places, and
among the flowers a lark brooded ev