ntony bent
and took her hand.

"Cousin Antony, Cousin Antony----"

"Why, Bella, Bella, little cousin, what's the matter?"

And above the sobs that he felt tremble through him, he asked of
Gardiner--who, young as he was, stifled his tears back and gulped his
own grief like a man--

"What's the row, old chap?"

But Bella told him passionately. "Jetty, _Jetty's dead_!"

Soothed by her cousin's hand on her head, she calmed, buried her face in
the cool handkerchief with which he wiped her tears. In the circle of
his arms Bella stood, tearful, sobbing, nothing but a child, and yet she
appealed to Fairfax in her tears as she had not done before, and her
abandon went to the core of his being and smote a bell which from
thenceforth rang like her name--"Bella"--and he used to think that it
was from that moment.... Well, her tears at any rate stirred him as
never did any tears in the world.

She wiped her eyes. "Jetty died last night; he sang himself to death.
You should have heard him sing! This morning when they came to give him
water and feed him, Jetty was dead."

Gardiner pointed to the table. "See, we've made him a coffin. We're
going to his funewal now."

A discarded cigar box lined with cotton was the only coffin the children
had found for the wild wood creature whose life had gone out in song.

"We don't know where to buwy him, Cousin Antony."

"I tried," Bella murmured, touching the blackbird's breast with gentle
fingers, "I tried to write him a poem, an epitaph; but I cried so I
couldn't."

She held Antony's handkerchief to her tear-stained cheek.

"May I keep your handkerchief for just this afternoon? It smells so
delicious. You could make a cast of him, couldn't you?--like the
death-mask of great men in father's books?"

Fairfax dissuaded them from the funeral, at which Gardiner was to say,
"Now I lay me," and Fairfax had been elected to read the Lord's Prayer.
He rolled the bird up in another handkerchief (he appeared to be rich in
them) and put it reverently in his overcoat pocket, promising faithfully
to see that Jetty should be buried in Miss Whitcomb's back yard, under
the snow, and, moreover, to mark the place with a stick, so that the
children could find it when spring came.

Then Bella, tear-stained but resigned, suggested that they should play
"going to Siberia."

"I _can't_ work to-day, Cousin Antony! Don't make me. It would seem like
sewing on Sunday."

Without comment, Fairfax accept