not to see, not to hear; and directly, in this blind, groping way, as
if he were falling to pieces somehow, there he was turning into Miss
Sally and Miss Polly Graham's store, where they only sold lady things.

Hope Carolina waited outside, openly and shamelessly watching to see
what he was going to do. She never peeped secretly; that wouldn't be
respectable.

In a minute she said, "Oh!" her eyes stretched wide with delighted
wonder; for he was _buying_ lady things--fairy lace, shimmering satin,
narrow doll-baby ribbon, as lovely as heaven! When he went out,
quickly, as if he were almost running, Hope Carolina still waited,
wondering what Miss Sally and Miss Polly, the two old-maid sisters,
who were Democrats and very nice people themselves, were going to do
with the splendor which still lay upon the counter.

But they did not tell. They told something else--a thing so full of
wonder, so dreadful, that, with another exclamation, one which drew
four astonished maiden eyes to her suddenly blanched cheeks, the child
took to her heels and fled as if pursued by a thousand terrors.

She thought of it all the time she was eating more hot corn-bread and
sorghum at dinner--the thing Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham had said
to each other; the thing which seemed so new, so strange, so _loud
and awful_, like the hellfire things Baptist ministers talked about.

Then, after supper, she fell asleep in the pineapple bed, still
thinking of it; and all the next day, still playing funeral by the
paling fence, she thought of it again. And that night, when once more
she lay in the pineapple bed, there it was again, the strange loud