The school—the first I ever attended—was in the second story of an untenanted house on a side-street, rented from a villager. It was kept for ten months of the year. A vacation of a month in May, and another in September, divided two terms of five months each. I climbed the carpetless stairs to the big upper room six or eight times daily for five days a week, for forty weeks, and never without a quailing of nerve and sinking of heart as I strode past a locked door at the left of the entrance. Inside of that door I had had my first view of Death. I could not have been six years old, for it was summer, or early autumn, and I was walking my doll to sleep up and down the main alley of the garden, happy and bareheaded, and unconsciously “feeling my life in every limb,” when my mother called to me from the window to “come and be dressed.” “I am going to take you and your sister to a funeral,” she continued, as a maid buttoned me up in a clean white frock, put on my Sunday shoes, and brushed the rebellious mop of hair that was never smooth for ten minutes in the day. “May I take my doll?” asked I, “sh-sh-ing” her in a cuddling arm. I was trying very hard to love lifeless dolls. “Shame on you, Miss Firginny!” put in the maid, for all the world as if I had spoken in church. “Did anybody ever see sech another chile fur sayin’ _things_?” she added to my mother. Mea looked properly shocked; my mother, ever light of heart, and inclined to let unimportant mistakes pass, smiled. “We don’t take dolls to funerals, my daughter. It would not be right.” I did not push inquiries as to the nature of the entertainment to which we were bound, albeit the word, already familiar to me by reason of two or three repetitions, was not in my vocabulary an hour ago. Content and pleased in the knowledge that an outing was on foot, I put my doll to bed in a closet under the stairs used by Mea and myself as a “baby-house,” shut the door to keep Argus and Rigo—sprightly puppies with inquisitive noses—from tearing her limb from limb, as they had rent her immediate predecessor, and sallied forth. The roadside was thick with sheep-mint and wild hoarhound and tansy. I bruised them in dancing along in front of my mother and my sober sister. The bitter-sweet smell arose to my nostrils to be blent forever in imagination with the event of the day.