en well-grown cottonwood-trees in the cemetery,
with rows of promising little elms, catalpas, and box-elders all
symmetrically set. The grass was brown, but free from weeds; the walks
were only smooth paths. But the shade of the cottonwood group, and the
quiet of the place, seemed inviting. Every foot of the wind-swept
elevation was visible to the whole town, but the distance was guarantee
for undisturbed meditation. Jerry had no interest in cemeteries. She had
rarely visited the corner of "Eden" where the few elect by family ties
had their last resting-place. She walked down the grassy paths toward
the largest cottonwoods, now, indifferent alike to the humble headstone
and the expensive and sometimes grotesque granite memorial. By the
tallest shaft in the place, designated by Stellar Bahrr as "Granddad
Poser's monniment," she sat down in the shade of the biggest trees, and
looked out at New Eden in its Sabbath-afternoon nap; at the winding Sage
Brush and the green and yellow fields, and black hedgerows, and rolling
prairies, with purple-shadowed draws and pale-brown swells, and groves
about distant farmhouses. She sat still for a long time, and she was so
lost in this view that she did not hear steps approaching until Mr. Ponk
was almost beside her.

"Good afternoon, Miss Swaim. Takin' a constitutional? They ain't no
Swaims laid away out here I reckon."

"Oh no," Jerry replied. "I shouldn't come here for that if there were."

Something about Ponk always made her good-natured. He was so grotesquely
impossible to her--a caricature cut from some comic magazine, rounded
out and animated.

"Say you wouldn't? Now that's real queer." The short man opened his
little eyes wide with surprise. "Now I soar down here regular every
Sunday evenin' of the world, summer and winter."

"What for?" Jerry asked, looking up at the speaker with curiosity.

New Eden was still in that stage when a funeral was a public event. And
the belief was still maintained that the dead out in the cemetery must
be conscious of every attention or lack of it shown to their memory by
visits and flowers, and the price of tombstones. In a word, to the New
Eden living, the New Eden dead were not really in the Great Hereafter,
but here, demanding consideration in the social economy of the
community.

Ponk was more shocked at Jerry's query than she could begin to
comprehend, and his interest in her and pity for her took a still
stronger grip on life.

"W