That moment ended my vain rebellion. I accepted fate and Coretta; which done, it was an easy matter to become very fond of her. She had a bluebell prettiness that never failed in any light or under any stress. It seemed so fragile, that I was always expecting it to vanish, or break into an untraceable legend of itself; but it never did. One day, looking in at her kitchen door, I thought of her as the fairy slave of a witch, made to mix strange brews and perform rude incantations. She was kneeling on the floor, before a pan of hog’s feet newly scalded. A sausage-mill, screwed to the table, betrayed its unfinished work. From the stove came the hiss of a kettle of fat in danger of burning. A tub in the corner held partly washed clothes, drab with grime. Children darted, dodged, and crawled. And Sam, no doubt, was momentarily expected in to a dinner yet uncooked. But Coretta lifted a face so unconsciously and incongruously pleasing in its boudoir daintiness, that I laughed aloud, and had to cover the discourtesy with sudden interest in the baby’s attempt to eat a bit of shiny matter picked from her continent of discovery, the ash-pan. Coretta snatched the baby and began to feed it in the way most fashionable where milk-bottles are unknown. “If I could skip a year ’thout a baby, I b’lieve I could ketch up with my work,” she said. But a cherishing squeeze of her offspring confessed immediate repentance; and I had to remain dumb before the sublimity of ignorance that accepted death and birth alike as the will of God. Her own mind was making occult connections. “Did you see the sign in the elements last night, Mis’ Dolly?” I had not seen. “It was jest after the rain stopped, an’ it was awful. There was a great white cloud with red streaks like blood runnin’ through it, an’ they ’most made letters. Sam said he guessed it was Hebrew, like the Bible was first wrote in, if we only had the preacher here to tell us. Nothin’ ’s goin’ to keep me from meetin’ next Sunday. I want to know if he read it an’ what it said. It may have been a warnin’ to them people to stop fightin’; but I reckon we all ort to be a little more keerful about doin’ the Lord’s will.” I decided to defer any unorthodox suggestions, and divagated with: “What’s the matter with Irma’s nose?” “She fell out o’ bed an’ nearly broke it. I had a time stoppin’ the blood. I was so scared at first I couldn’t remember the verse in the Bible that stops it right off, an’ I run aroun’ tryin’ everything else first. Then I got the verse right, an’ her nose never bled another drap.” “What verse is that, Coretta?” “The sixth verse of the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel. Irmie never fell out of bed ’fore this, an’ it was time she did. I was right glad of it after I remembered the verse and got the blood stopped.” “Why glad, Coretta?” “You can’t raise a child that never falls out o’ bed. They die shore. Didn’t you know that, Mis’ Dolly?”