r turning back to kiss him, with her hands
full of flowers, and with the peacocks trailing beside as if they had
forgotten the dear Prestons entirely.

Then, the Radical Judge seemed to know bushels and bushels of
fairy-stories; and when they came near the boxwood hedge, Hope
Carolina would sometimes hear him begin a new one. They always began
in the right way, "Once upon a time," and that seemed very remarkable,
for how could a Radical Judge know the right sort of fairy-stories?

When they moved away again, the child in the enemy house would feel
her throat gulp sometimes. She knew it was wrong, but oh, she would
have loved to hear the end!

One morning, weeks and weeks after the peaches, when the peacocks had
been gone for days,--they made too much noise, Hope Carolina
knew,--when all the empty, sunburned garden seemed to say weepingly,
"There will be no more fairy-tales," she woke with the morning star,
and, sitting bolt up in bed, blinked wonderingly, a little painfully,
in the direction of the Radical Judge's front door. It was too dark to
see the knob yet, but she knew the thing must be there, the long,
angelically sweet drop of white ribbon and flowers--the poetic and
wistful mourning which is only hung for little dead children.

A great doctor had come down from Baltimore and gone again; and the
Radical Judge's wife was still taking things to forget.

* * * * *

The heart of six is full of mystery. All that first morning, with a
piteous earnestness, a piteous heartlessness, Hope Carolina played
funeral in the front yard, in the place where the stone fort had once
been and where the peach-pits were now planted. Every now and then she
would stop patting the little mounds of earth--mounds of earth covered
with sweet flowers, in a place as beautiful as any garden, were the
chief thing in her idea of funerals--and, standing tiptoe, she would
stare over the paling fence, hoping the Radical Judge would come by.
At last, late in the forenoon, her dogged vigilance was rewarded; and
in a moment, bonnetless, an untidy midget in low-necked pink calico
which even had a hole behind--there she was out of the gate, following
closely at his heels. She couldn't tell exactly why she followed him;
she only knew she wanted to--perhaps to see if he thought, too, as
everybody said, that the little crippled Grace was better off up in
the sky. She fancied maybe he didn't, he was so different,
someho