sked you to look at her!" retorted I, crossly, putting my hand
over the unfeatured face. "Mam' Chloe says, 'Handsome is as handsome
does.' Anyhow, my doll-baby doesn't say mean things to folks."

The little bout raised the tear-level nearer to the escape-pipe. It was
easy to cry when Mary 'Liza's breathing assured me that she was asleep.
It also confirmed my resolution to have the poor, deformed dear dead
and buried without useless delay.

I cannot decide what moved me to bear her off secretly to the
seldom-used staircase in the north wing to prepare her for her last long
sleep. I escaped thither the next morning, as soon as lessons were over,
and seated myself half-way up the steep staircase. It was scarred in
many places by fire and smoke. No amount of scrubbing could quite efface
the traces of the catastrophe. I looked at them for a long time before
beginning my sad task, and did not shrink from the sight. My state of
mind was distinctly morbid. Children were not reckoned to have nerves at
that date, and little notice was taken of their silent moods. That I
should voluntarily seek a solitary quarter of the house, which was
shunned by others, never entered my mother's or my nurse's mind.

I had abundance of time in which to be as miserable as I thought I ought
to be, and diligently nursed such sickly, sentimental fancies as ought
to be foreign to a healthy young mind, while I divested maimed and
sightless Musidora of her flannel mufflings and dressed her in a clean
night-gown. Without saying what I meant to do with it I had begged a
square of white cambric from Mam' Chloe, and set about notching it with
a pair of blunt scissors. Mariposa had described a winding-sheet
minutely to me, and I meant that my dead doll-baby should be decently
laid out. The notching took a tedious time, and the bows of the blunt
scissors left purple furrows upon thumb and fingers. Uncle Ike had given
me an empty raisin box. I lined it with Musidora's own mattress and
quilt, spread the "pinked" cambric on them, laid the remains (no
figurative phrase in this connection) upon this bed, folding the one arm
left to the unfortunate across her breast, and wrapped the edges of the
winding-sheet over her face. With difficulty I coaxed the points of four
projecting nails left in the lid into corresponding holes in the box,
and having no hammer, sat down upon the top to make them fast, bouncing
up and down a few times to make a good job of it.

I sat