"Only," Calliope added, "I do say you'd ought to hev some sort o' leadin' strap even to craziness, an' that I ain't got an' never had. I guess folks thinks I'm rill lunar when I take the notion. Only thing comforts me, they don't know how lunar I rilly can be." Then she told me about 'Leven. "A shroud, to look rill nice," Calliope said, "ought to be made as much as you can like a dress--barrin' t' you can't fit it. Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb an' I made Jennie Crapwell's shroud--it was white mull and a little narrow lace edge on a rill life-like collar. We finished it the noon o' the day after Jennie died,--you know Jennie was Delia's stepsister that they'd run away from--an' I brought it over to my house an' pressed it an' laid it on the back bedroom bed--the room I don't use excep' for company an' hang my clean dresses in the closet of. "In the afternoon I went up to the City on a few little funeral urrants,--a crape veil for Jennie's mother an' like that,--you know Jennie died first. We wasn't goin' to dress her till the next mornin'--her mother wanted we should leave her till then in her little pink sacque she'd wore, an' the soft lavender cloth they use now spread over her careless. An' we wanted to, too, because sence Mis' Jeweler Sprague died nobody could do up the Dead's hair, an' Jennie wa'n't the exception. "Mis' Sprague, she'd hed a rill gift that way. She always done folks' hair when they died an' she always got it like life--she owned up how, after she begun doin' it so much, she used to set in church an' in gatherin's and find herself lookin' at the backs of heads to see if they was two puffs or three, an' whether the twist was under to left or over to right--so's she'd know, if the time come. But none of us could get Jennie's to look right. We studied her pictures an' all too, but best we could do we got it all drawed back, abnormal. "I was 'most all the afternoon in the City, an' it was pretty warm--a hot April followin' on a raw March. I stood waitin' for the six o'clock car an', my grief, I was tired. My feet ached like night in preservin' time. An' I was thinkin' how like a dunce we are to live a life made up mostly of urrants an' feetache followin'. _Yet_, after all, the right sort o' urrants an' like that _is_ life--an', if they do ache, 'tain't like your feet was your soul. Well, an' just before the car come, up arrove the girl. "I guess she was towards thirty, but she seemed even older, 'count o' bein' large an' middlin' knowin'. First I see her was a check gingham sleeve reachin' out an' she was elbowed up clost by me. 'Say,' she says, 'couldn't you gimme a nickel? I'm starved hollow.' She didn't look it special--excep' as thin, homely folks always looks sort o' hungry. An' she was homely--kind o' coarse made, more like a shed than a dwellin' house. Her dress an' little flappy cape hed the looks o' bein' held on by her shoulders alone, an' her hands was midnight dirty.