"Land," she said, "sometimes I think I'll make some shrouds an' starch 'em up rill good, an' take 'em to the City an' offer to folks. An' say: Here. Die--die. You've got to, some part o' you, before you can awake an' put on your beautiful garments an' your strength. I told you, you know," she added, "I guess sometimes I kind o' believe in craziness!" XVIII IN THE WILDERNESS A CEDAR In answer to my summons Liddy Ember appeared before me one morning and outspread a Vienna book of coloured fashion-plates. "Dressmakin' 'd be a real drudgery for me," she said, "if it wasn't for havin' the colour plates an' makin' what I can to look like 'em. Sometimes I get a collar or a cuff that seems almost like the picture. There's always somethin' in the way of a cedar," she added blithely. "A cedar?" I repeated. She nodded, her plain face lighting. "That's what Calliope use' to call 'em," she explained; "'I will plant in the wilderness the cedar,' you know--in the Bible." And I did recall the phrase on Calliope's lips, as if it were the theme of her. From this one and that one, and now and then from her herself, I had heard something of Calliope's love story. Indeed, all Friendship knew it and spoke of it with no possibility of gossip or speculation, but with a kind of genius for consideration. I did not know, however, that it was of this that Liddy meant to speak, for she began her story far afield, with some talk of Oldmoxon house, in which I lived, and of its former tenants. "Right here in this house is mixed up in it," she said; "I been thinkin' about it all the way up. Not very many have lived here in the Oldmoxon house, and the folks that lived here the year I mean come so quiet nobody knew it until they was here--an' that ain't easy to do in Friendship. First we knew they was in an' housekeepin'. Their accounts was in the name of a Mis' Morgan. We see her now an' then on the street--trim an' elderly an' no airs excep' she wouldn't open up a conversation an' she wouldn't return her calls. 'Most everybody called on her inside the two weeks, but the woman was never home an' she never paid any attention. She didn't seem to have no men folks, an' she settled her bills with checks, like she didn't have any ready money. Little by little we all dropped her, which she ought to of expected. Even when it got around that there was sickness in the house, nobody went near, we feelin' as if we knew as good as the best what dignity calls for.