e,
on account of such speeches as this. I wonder in what language he is
writing poetry now.

We had very few toys. Neither Fetchke nor I cared much for dolls. A
rag baby apiece contented us, and if we had a set of jackstones we
were perfectly happy. Our jackstones, by the way, were not stones but
bones. We used the knuckle bones of sheep, dried and scraped; every
little girl cherished a set in her pocket.

I did not care much for playing house. I liked soldiers better, but it
was not much fun without boys. Boys and girls always played apart.

I was very fond of playing Gentiles. I am afraid I liked everything
that was a little risky. I particularly enjoyed being the corpse in a
Gentile funeral. I was laid across two chairs, and my playmates, in
borrowed shawls and long calicoes, with their hair loose and with
candlesticks in their hands, marched around me, singing unearthly
songs, and groaning till they scared themselves. As I lay there,
covered over with a black cloth, I felt as dead as dead could be; and
my playmates were the unholy priests in gorgeous robes of velvet and
silk and gold. Their candlesticks were the crosiers that were carried
in Christian funeral processions, and their chantings were hideous
incantations to the arch enemy, the Christian God of horrible images.
As I imagined the bareheaded crowds making way for my funeral to pass,
my flesh crept, not because I was about to be buried, but because the
people _crossed themselves_. But our procession stopped outside the
church, because we did not dare to carry even our make-believe across
that accursed threshold. Besides, none of us had ever been
inside,--God forbid!--so we did not know what did happen next.

When I arose from my funeral I was indeed a ghost. I felt unreal and
lost and hateful. I don't think we girls liked each other much after
playing funeral. Anyway, we never played any more on the same day; or
if we did, we soon quarrelled. Such was the hold which our hereditary
terrors and hatreds had upon our childish minds that if we only mocked
a Christian procession in our play, we suffered a mutual revulsion of
feeling, as if we had led each other into sin.

We gathered oftener at our house than anywhere else. On Sabbath days
we refrained, of course, from soldiering and the like, but we had just
as good a time, going off to promenade, two and two, in our very best
dresses; whispering secrets and telling stories. We had a few stories
in the cir