tting it.

"Just's if somebody was leaning against it!" said I, pettishly, and
flung my whole weight against the lower panel.

The door flew back and I fell headlong, face downward, on the floor, the
bundle flying ahead of me clear to the hearth. I picked myself up,
rubbed my smarting palms and, in a vile humor, recovered the detestable
cause of all the trouble. I boxed the lop-ears of the bonnet, and gave
the apron a vicious shake, in restoring them to their respective pegs.
Then, I backed down from the chair on which I had been standing, and
started for the door. A feeble cry stopped me as if a shot had passed
through me.

The room was in afternoon shadow, and the blinds of the larger of the
two windows had blown shut. The cry quavered out again, and at the same
instant I saw--or verily believed that I saw with my natural
eyes--Cousin Mary Bray seated in the rocking-chair between the hearth
and the window, holding a baby in her arms. She was rocking gently back
and forth, her face was pale and peaceful, and she wore a sort of dim
gray dress. Thus much I had seen when my father called loudly to me from
the bottom of the steps:--

"Molly! what are you doing up there? Come down directly! do you hear?"

The apparition disappeared on the instant, and as I moved toward the
door, I stumbled over something soft that mewed miserably. In a second I
had it in my arms,--a rack of bones covered with muddy, tangled gray
fur,--and rushed down the stairs.

"I told you so, father! don't you see? It is Alexander the Great. Now,
isn't it?"

Will it be believed that the commotion attendant upon the recognition of
the wanderer, the talk, conjectures and questions, the nursing and
feeding, and cosseting the creature who was at the point of death from
starvation and fatigue--put all thought of revealing what I had beheld
in the haunted chamber out of my head, until, when I recalled it in all
its vividness, I simply could not speak of it? It was all like a swift,
bad dream, the telling of which might revive the unpleasant sensation
it created in passing. I do not pretend to explain a child's reserve on
subjects which have gone very far into the deeps of a consciousness that
never lets them go. Perhaps the solution is partly in the poverty of a
vocabulary which lags painfully behind the development of thought and
emotion. Certain it is that I was a woman grown before I ever confided
to a living soul what I thought sat in the rocking-c