"home-folks" and other people's servants.

Not that I was ever lonely. What I called "things" were an unfailing
resource to me. An ant-hill was entertainment for a whole forenoon; I
watched bees and their hives by the hour; my vault kept me busy and
happy all day. If Cousin Molly Belle suspected what I was about, she
asked no questions, and refrained from spying upon me. When dressed
clean in the afternoon, for the second time since breakfast,--the
manufacture of mud-pies, puddings, and cakes, and the baking of several
batches in the sun, having engrossed the morning,--I took _The Fairchild
Family_ out into the summer-house and reread, for the tenth time, the
account of the opening of the family vault.

Why, I reasoned within myself, should innocent dumb creatures be thrown
away like dead leaves, when they have stopped living? It would be kind
in me, or in anybody, to bury them in vaults, and to write Bible verses
and all that on their tombstones. I would dig another vault to-morrow
and look around for things to put into it,--and still another the next
day. I had, in imagination, honeycombed the space under the benches with
catacombs, and my book was clean forgotten, before I saw a movement in
the sandy flooring, close to the edge of the flat stone sealing the
mouth of the vault. I leaned forward to inspect it more nearly. The
stone had been undermined at one side, and a hole left there, through
which a line of flies, gray with dust, was feebly crawling into the
sunshine. There seemed to be a thousand of them, all dusty, but some
more active than others. As soon as they were quite clear of the hole,
they dispersed in various directions, some alighting upon twigs and
blades of grass, some flying up to the benches, where they sat cleaning
their bodies and wings with their feet and mouths.

I worked my hands into the hole and raised the stone. A cloud of
resurrected flies arose in my astonished face. The vault was quick with
them. The dry sand, warmed by the sun, that I had sifted over them, had
acted as a hot blanket upon the chilled body of a dying man. When I got
rid of the swarm I examined the vault. Both of the terrapins were
missing. The sapping and mining was their work. Through the tunnel thus
excavated they had regained their liberty, and released a mighty host of
fellow-captives.

"The rest of you are _dead_, anyhow!" said I, aloud, intensely chagrined
at the cheat practised upon my benevolent nature, and I s