The heart of six is full of mystery. All that first morning, with a piteous earnestness, a piteous heartlessness, Hope Carolina played funeral in the front yard, in the place where the stone fort had once been and where the peach-pits were now planted. Every now and then she would stop patting the little mounds of earth--mounds of earth covered with sweet flowers, in a place as beautiful as any garden, were the chief thing in her idea of funerals--and, standing tiptoe, she would stare over the paling fence, hoping the Radical Judge would come by. At last, late in the forenoon, her dogged vigilance was rewarded; and in a moment, bonnetless, an untidy midget in low-necked pink calico which even had a hole behind--there she was out of the gate, following closely at his heels. She couldn't tell exactly why she followed him; she only knew she wanted to--perhaps to see if he thought, too, as everybody said, that the little crippled Grace was better off up in the sky. She fancied maybe he didn't, he was so different, somehow--not like the old, fierce Radical Judge at all. And when really nice white gentlemen--_Democrats_, who had never noticed him before--stood respectfully aside with _their_ beaver hats off, he walked still down the middle of the dirt sidewalk, and did not seem to see them at all. [Illustration: "IT WAS THE QUAINT CUSTOM AT FUNERALS IN FAIRVILLE TO FOLLOW MOURNERS IN LINE FROM THE GRAVE"] Once when her brass-toed shoe kicked his heel by the railroad,--along which, the littlest distance away, was the historic spot where Uncle John had got the bullet,--she said "Thank you" aloud. She meant it for the peaches, for she had just remembered that it wasn't very polite not to thank people for things. But still he seemed not to see, not to hear; and directly, in this blind, groping way, as if he were falling to pieces somehow, there he was turning into Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham's store, where they only sold lady things. Hope Carolina waited outside, openly and shamelessly watching to see what he was going to do. She never peeped secretly; that wouldn't be respectable. In a minute she said, "Oh!" her eyes stretched wide with delighted wonder; for he was _buying_ lady things--fairy lace, shimmering satin, narrow doll-baby ribbon, as lovely as heaven! When he went out, quickly, as if he were almost running, Hope Carolina still waited, wondering what Miss Sally and Miss Polly, the two old-maid sisters, who were Democrats and very nice people themselves, were going to do with the splendor which still lay upon the counter. But they did not tell. They told something else--a thing so full of wonder, so dreadful, that, with another exclamation, one which drew four astonished maiden eyes to her suddenly blanched cheeks, the child took to her heels and fled as if pursued by a thousand terrors.