d, on which circuit he lived, I
have forgotten long ago.

In spite of a really well-settled, worldly mind William prayed away its
foundations during those thirty years, until now the very scene of his
passing floats a mist in memory. I know he lay in the same house where
he had brought me on our wedding day. Through the window in the pearl
light of the early morning there was the same freshness upon the hills,
the same streams glistening like silver maces between; there was the
same little valley below, fluted in like a cup filled with corn and
honey and bees and flowers. The same gray farmhouses brooded close to
the earth, with children playing in the dooryards. It was all there
the morning he died, as it had been that blue and glad morning thirty
years before; but I could not see it or feel it with him lying
stretched and still upon the bed, with the sheet drawn over his face,
and the people crowding in, whispering, shuffling, bearing the long,
black coffin among them. I say, it is dim and blurred and I cannot
think it or write it properly. There seemed a rime upon the
window-panes; the hills were bare, and the cup of the valley lay
drained and empty before me, with the shadow of death darkening all the
light of the day.

A very old woman, bent, shriveled down to her hull and bones, with her
thin lips sucked in between her gums, came and tugged at my sleeve. I
recognized Sister Glory White, wearing the same look of rapacious
cheerfulness upon her bones that she used to wear upon her fat face
when she had a "body" to prepare for burial.

"Come, Sister Thompson, you must git up and go out. We air ready to
lay him out now."

"Oh, not him!" I cried; "you have laid out so many. Let some one else
do it!" For I could not forget the frightful pleasure she had taken
years ago in her ghoulish office.

"And why not him? I've helped to put away every man, woman and child
that has died in this settlement since I was grown, and I ain't goin'
to shirk my duty to Brother Thompson--not that I ever expected to do it
for him." She babbled on, gently urging me from the room, where her
presence was the last blinding touch of horror for me.

* * * * * *

So far, my autobiography has been mixed with William's biography, just
as my life seems to mingle with the dust in his grave. But I came to
an experience now of my own; unglorified by William, so strange that I
cannot explain it unless t