“This is how they feel,” thought I, as I drowned in placidity without a bubble struggling overhead. “This is why protracted meetings are held in autumn. Ah, I will call my poem ‘The Season of Piety.’” I began to feel like the good wife of a deacon. Nay, I was the deacon himself, and blushed in his elderly trousers. With her usual ghostly suddenness, Katy appeared. “Mommy’s got the milkweed in her breast agin, an’ the baby’s all broke out; she’s afraid it’s the measles an’ we’ll all take ’em.” I rose. Certainly they would all take them. The season of piety was ended. Both cases were happily light, and when Coretta looked up from her pillow and said, “We ain’t goin’ away. I’ve been thinkin’ what it ud be like to git sick away from home an’ everybody,” I did not feel that a slight reproof would be cruel. “Stay? With nothing laid in for the winter?” “But you’ve put up such a lot.” My heart, which had softened at sight of her young cheek tracked red with the whimsical fever, felt a stony relapse. “You know, Coretta, I have had to consider other plans.” She was terrified, but unbelieving. The heavens could not really fall. “_You wouldn’t let us stay?_” “On one condition, perhaps.” Her face shone with relief. She had met conditions before, and melted through them. “What’s that, Mis’ Dolly?” “You’ll never wake me up again to borrow something for breakfast?” “No, I shore won’t.” “Cross your heart?” “Cross my heart.” “Swear to God?” “Swear to God.” I looked down at the lovely face, contented with the thought of being sick and _at home_, and my smile undid me. “Swear to God,” she repeated feebly, “unless, o’ course, we’re jest smack out o’ stuff.” III SERENA AND WILD STRAWBERRIES I She was not an unalloyed joy that first year of our friendship. Her imperturbability did not always seem as a restful evergreen wall, in whose shadow I could sit until perplexities lost their heat. At times it was a “no thoroughfare” with the meadows of desire gleaming beyond. I called one day and found her churning by the spring, a pleasing picture, too, under the trees. Her rounded, youngish figure gave no hint of her seven-fold maternity, and however ragged the rest of her family might be, she always magically managed to be neat. She was singing leisurely and churning in rhythm--a most undomestic performance; but my eye was not Mrs. Poyser’s, and if it had been, it could not have embarrassed Serena. “I’m takin’ my time,” she said, “fer this is my last churnin’ fer a good spell, I reckon.” “Your last? Why, is the cow sick?--dead? And you have just bought her?” I asked, my concern sharpened perhaps by the thought of a very inconvenient loan that had gone abysmally into her purchase. “She got so many sweet apples last night she’s foundered herself--clear light ruined, granpap says.” “Surely you didn’t turn her into the orchard?”