rawberry festival was not put off and the town paper said that "a
pleasant time was had by all." Most of the talk was about Will Rudd.
The quiet shoe clerk had provided the town with an alarm, an
astonishment. He was most astounded of all. As he rode back to the frame
house in the swaying carriage he absolutely could not believe that such
hopes, such plans, could be shattered with such wanton, wasteful
cruelty. That he should have loved, married, and begotten, and that the
new-made mother and the new-born child should be struck dead, nullified,
returned to clay--such things were too foolish, too spendthrift, to
believe.

It is strange that people do not get used to death. It has come to
nearly every being anybody has ever heard of; and whom it has not yet
reached, it will. Every one of the two billions of us on earth to-day
expects it to come to him, and (if he have them) to his son, his
daughter, his man-servant, his maid-servant, his ox, his ass, the
stranger within his gates, the weeds by the road. Kittens and kingdoms,
potato-bugs, plants, and planets--all are on the visiting-list.

Death is the one expectation that never fails to arrive. But it comes
always as a new thing, an unheard-of thing, a miracle. It is the
commonest word in the lexicon, yet it always reads as a _hapax
legomenon_. It is like spring, though so unlike. For who ever believed
that May would emerge from March this year? And who ever remembers that
violets were suddenly abroad on the hills last April, too?

William Rudd ought to have known better. In a town where funerals were
social events dangerously near to diversion, he had been unusually
frequent at them. For he belonged to the local chapter of the Knights of
Pythias, and when a fellow-member in good standing was forced to resign,
William Rudd donned his black suit, his odd-looking cocked hat with the
plume, and the anachronous sword, which he carried as one would expect a
shoe clerk to carry a sword. The man in the hearse ahead went to no
further funerals, stopped paying his dues, made no more noise at the
bowling-alley, and ceased to dent his pew cushion. Somebody got his job
at once and, after a decent time, somebody else probably got his wife.
The man became a remembrance, if that.

Rudd had long realized that people eventually become dead; but he had
never realized death. He had been an oblivious child when his mother and
father had taken the long trip whose tickets read but one way,