Lucy would be rocking her baby and singing, "Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber." Candace's favourite she made up about her man who had been killed in the war, when they had been married only six weeks, which hadn't given her time to grow tired of him if he hadn't been "all her fancy painted." She arranged the words like "Ben Battle was a soldier bold," and she sang them to suit herself, and cried every single minute: "They wrapped him in his uniform, They laid him in the tomb, My aching heart I thought 'twould break, But such was my sad doom." Candace just loved that song. She sang it all the time. Leon said our pie always tasted salty from her tears, and he'd take a bite and smile at her sweetly and say: "How UNIFORM you get your pie, Candace!" May's favourite was "Joy Bells." Father would be whispering over to himself the speech he was preparing to make at the next prayer-meeting. We never could learn his speeches, because he read and studied so much it kept his head so full, he made a new one every time. You could hear Laddie's deep bass booming the "Bedouin Love Song" for a mile; this minute it came rolling across the corn: "Open the door of thy heart, And open thy chamber door, And my kisses shall teach thy lips The love that shall fade no more Till the sun grows cold, And the Stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!" I don't know how the Princess stood it. If he had been singing that song where I could hear it and I had known it was about me, as she must have known he meant her, I couldn't have kept my arms from around his neck. Over in the barn Leon was singing: "A life on the ocean wave, A home on the rolling deep, Where codfish waggle their tails 'Mid tadpoles two feet deep." The minute he finished, he would begin reciting "Marco Bozzaris," and you could be sure that he would reach the last line only to commence on the speech of "Logan, Chief of the Mingoes," or any one of the fifty others. He could make your hair stand a little straighter than any one else; the best teachers we ever had, or even Laddie, couldn't make you shivery and creepy as he could. Because all of us kept going like that every day, people couldn't pass without hearing, so THAT was what Mr. Pryor meant.