drew near to scan the device. He was able to divine that the intention of the artist had not been one of portraiture.
"That ain't either his picture," he said, heatedly. "That's a cupid!"
"Ho, gee, gosh! Ain't cupids got legs? Where's its legs?"
"Then it's an angel."
"Angels are longer. I know now—it's a goop. And here's some more reading."
He ran his fingers along the worn lettering, then brought his eyes close and read—glibly in the beginning:
Behold this place as you pass by.
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you must be.
Prepare for death, and follow me.
The reader's voice lost in fullness and certainty as he neared the end of this strophe.
"Say, we better get right out of here," said Merle, stepping toward the fence. Even Wilbur was daunted by the blunt warning from beyond.
"Here's another," called Merle, pausing on his way toward the fence. In hushed, fearful tones he declaimed:
Dear companion in your bloom,
Behold me moldering in the tomb,
For
Death is a debt to Nature due,
Which I have paid, and so must you.
"There, now, I must say!" called Merle. "We better hurry out!"
But the Wilbur twin lingered. Ripe berries still glistened about the stone of the departed Jonas Whipple.
"Aw, gee, gosh, they're just old ones!" he declared. "It says this one passed to his reward in 1828, and we wasn't born then, so he couldn't be meaning us, could he? We ain't passed to our reward yet, have we? I simply ain't going to pay the least attention to it."
A bit nervously he fell again to picking the berries. The mere feel of them emboldened him.
"Gee, gosh! We ain't followed him yet, have we?"
"'As I am now, so you must be!'" quoted the other in warning.
"Well, my sakes, don't everyone in town know that? But it don't mean we're going to be—be it—right off."
"You better come just the samey!"
But the worker was stubborn.
"Ho, I guess I ain't afraid of any old Whipple as old as what this one is!"
"Well, anyway," called Merle, still in hushed tones, "I guess I got enough berries from this place."
"Aw, come on!" urged the worker.
In a rush of bravado he now extemporized a chant of defiance:
Old Jonas Whipple
Was an old cripple!
Old Jonas Whipple
Was an old cripple!
The Merle twin found this beyond endurance. He leaped for the fence and gained its top, looking back with a blanched face to see the offender smitten. He wanted to go at once, but this might be worth waiting for.
Wilbur continued to pick berries. Again he chanted loudly, mocking the solemnities of eternity:
Old Jonas Whipple
Was an old cripple!
Was an old—
The mockery died in his throat, and he froze to a statue of fear. Beyond the headstone of Jonas Whipple, and toward the centre of the plot, a clump of syringa was plainly observed to sway with the movements of a being unseen.
"I told you!" came the hoarse whisper of Merle, but he, too, was chained by fright to the fence top.
They waited, breathless, in the presence of the king of terrors. Again the bush swayed with a sinister motion. A deeper hush fell about them; the breeze died and song birds stilled their notes. A calamity was imminent. Neither watcher now doubted that a mocked Jonas Whipple would terribly issue from the tangle of shrubbery.
The bushes were again agitated; then at the breaking, point of fear for the Cowan twins the emergent figure proved to be not Jonas but a trifling and immature female descendant of his, who now sped rapidly toward them across the intervening glade, nor were the low mounds sacred to her in her progress. Her short shirt of a plaid gingham flopped above her thin, bony legs as she ran, and she grasped a wide-brimmed straw hat in one hand.
It should be said that this girl appalled the twins hardly less than would an avenging apparition of the outraged Jonas Whipple. Beings of a baser extraction, they had looked upon Whipples only from afar and with awe. Upon this particular Whipple they had looked with especial awe. Other known members of the tribe were inhumanly old and gray and withered, not creatures with whom the most daring fancy could picture the Cowan twins sustaining any sane human relationship. But this one was young and moderately understandable. Observed from across the room of the Methodist Sunday-school, she was undoubtedly human like them; but always so befurbished with rare and shining garments, with glistening silks and costly velvets and laces, with bonnets of pink rosebuds and gloves of kid, that the thought of any secular relationship had been preposterous. Yet she was young, an animal of their own age, whose ways could be comprehended.
She halted her mad flight when she discovered them, then turned to survey the way she had come. She was panting. The twins regarded her stonily, shaping defenses if she brought up anything regarding any one who might have mocked Jonas Whipple.
When again she could breathe evenly, she said: "It was Cousin Juliana driving by was why I dashed in here. I think I have foiled her."
She was not now the creature of troubled elegance that Sabbaths had revealed her. The gingham dress was such as a daughter of the people might have worn, and the straw hat, though beribboned, was not impressive. She was a bony little girl, with quick, greenish eyes and a meagre pigtail of hair of the hue that will often cause a girl to be called Carrots. Her thin, eager face was lavishly freckled; her nose was trivial to the last extreme. Besides her hat, she carried and now nonchalantly drew refreshment from a stick of spirally striped candy inserted for half its length through the end of a lemon. The candy was evidently of a porous texture, so that the juice of the fruit would reach the consumer's pursed lips charmingly modified by its passage along the length of the sweet. One needed but to approximate a vacuum at the upper end of the candy, and the mighty and mysterious laws of atmospheric pressure completed the benign process.
It should be said for the twins that they were not social climbers. In their instant infatuation for this novel device they quite lost the thrill that should have been theirs from the higher aspects of the encounter. They were not impressed at meeting a Whipple on terms of seeming equality. They had eyes and desire solely for this delectable refection. Again and again the owner enveloped the top of the candy with prehensile lips; deep cavities appeared in her profusely spangled cheeks. Her eyes would close in an ecstasy of concentration. The twins stared, and at intervals were constrained to swallow.
"Gee, gosh!" muttered the Wilbur twin, helpless in the sight of so fierce a joy. His brother descended briskly from the fence.
"I bet that's good," he said, genially, and taking the half-filled pail from his brother's unresisting grasp he approached the newcomer. "Try some of these nice ripe blackberries," he royally urged.
"Thanks a lot!" said the girl, and did so. But the hospitality remained one-sided.
"I have to keep up my strength," she explained. "I have a long, hard journey before me. I'm running away."
Blackberry juice now stained her chin, enriching a colour scheme already made notable by dye from the candy.
"Running away!" echoed the twins. This, also, was sane.
"Where to?" demanded Wilbur.
"Far,