coffin clapped in a canoe."

"Exactly," said Mrs. Vervain. "I always feel as if I were going to my
own funeral when I get into it; and I've certainly had enough of
funerals never to want to have anything to do with another, as long as
I live."

She settled herself luxuriously upon the feather-stuffed leathern
cushions when the cabin was removed. Death had indeed been near her
very often; father and mother had been early lost to her, and the
brothers and sisters orphaned with her had faded and perished one after
another, as they ripened to men and women; she had seen four of her own
children die; her husband had been dead six years. All these
bereavements had left her what they had found her. She had truly
grieved, and, as she said, she had hardly ever been out of black since
she could remember.

"I never was in colors when I was a girl," she went on, indulging many
obituary memories as the gondola dipped and darted down the canal, "and
I was married in my mourning for my last sister. It did seem a little
too much when she went, Mr. Ferris. I was too young to feel it so much
about the others, but we were nearly of the same age, and that makes a
difference, don't you know. First a brother and then a sister: it was
very strange how they kept going that way. I seemed to break the charm
when I got married; though, to be sure, there was no brother left after
Marian."

Miss Vervain heard her mother's mortuary prattle with a face from which
no impatience of it could be inferred, and Mr. Ferris made no comment
on what was oddly various in character and manner, for Mrs. Vervain