Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/102

 I asked what I might do, and they said that I might put her slippers on her. They turned back the lacy spread with the lavender lining that covered her and I got to put on her feet her little gray slippers with white fur on ’em. They were the prettiest little things! And then I fixed her skirts, her gray satin petty and her lacy dress; and Nannette fixed her sleeves and we covered her up and kissed her good-bye, and we came away, and you can’t scare us with being dead any more!

“Nannette hasn’t jumped in the night since, not once. We know now that there are several kinds of being dead. There’s the kind where you’ve had a bad heart and you haven’t told true and you’ve taken things that didn’t belong to you, and you haven’t played the game square with God, and you haven’t had any respect for your government, and, of course, you ain’t goin’ to look very well whether you’re dead or alive if you’ve got things like that inside you. And then, added to that, there’s accidents that might happen to anybody—lyin’ in the water a long time and turtles is one thing, or bein’ burned in a fire or blown up in a factory. That’s your hard luck. But if you get to die at home, just to go to sleep softly in your own bed in the night, so softly that you never lift your hands off your breast, and when you see God a little sweet smile creeps over your face—— Gee! I bet God and all the angels were tickled to pieces to see Aunt Beth when she came walkin’ in, all slender and straight and young in her softy cloud dress! Nannette put forget-me-nots and Parma violets and heliotrope in her hands when she got