re Alas." Another one was a young lady with her
hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there
in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was crying into a
handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her other hand
with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said "I Shall Never
Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas." There was one where a young lady
was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her
cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing-wax
showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain
to it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said "And Art
Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas." These was all nice pictures, I
reckon, but I didn't somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I
was down a little they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was
sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures
to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost.
But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time
in the graveyard. She was at work on what they said was her greatest
picture when she took sick, and every day and every night it was her
prayer to be allowed to live till she got it done, but she never got
the chance. It was a picture of a young woman in a long white gown,
standing on the rail of a bridge all ready to jump off, with her hair
all down her back, and looking up to the moon, with the tears running
down her face, and she had two arms folded across her breast, and two
arms stretched out in front, and two more reaching up toward the
moon--and the idea was to see which pair would look best, and then
scratch out all the other arms; but, as I was saying, she died before
she got her mind made up, and now they kept this picture over the head
of the bed in her room, and every time her birthday come they hung
flowers on it. Other times it was hid with a little curtain. The young
woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face, but there was so
many arms it made her look too spidery, seemed to me.

This young girl kept a scrap-book when she was alive, and used to
paste obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it
out of the Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of
her own head. It was very good poetry. This is what she wrote about a
boy by the name of Stephen Dowling Bots that fell down a well and was
drownded:

ODE TO STE