“Mad! I was as mad as a hornet. I went back to that wink she’d given me in t’other dream and seemed like she’d gone back on her word--something Gram had never done livin’. I was off the seat of that hack in a jiffy, runnin’ aside the hearse. When the goin’ slowed up I stuck my head inside and hollered, ‘Ye git straight back whar ye b’long! And what’s more ye stay thar!’ Then I begun to whimper like I couldn’t stand my feelin’s another minute. ‘Gram,’ says I, ‘hain’t ye got any heart? Do ye want to disgrace us boys? How’ll ye cal’ate we’ll feel to have the neighbours thinkin’ we’re tryin’ to bury ye ag’in your will? We give ye them five days like we promised--can’t ye lay down decent and proper now?’ “That settled her. She turned, meek as a cow, climbed back into her coffin and closed the lid down. I went back to the hack and climbed up. We was still a-goin’ when I woke up.” IV An interlude followed. I tried to bring back my mind to the reality of life as I knew it to be. I fingered my trout flies and did my best to image the still, deep pool below the swamp where I had been on the point of casting just as my last leader broke. Half an hour more I could be back there, casting again. But the pool and the trout faded into oblivion beside the sterner reality of Gram Perkins. I was on the hack with young Zeb, my eyes fastened in growing perturbation on a pair of solid black doors. “Jes’ started on our January thaw when the next dream took me,” broke in Zeb. “We’d reached the cemetery. Grave dug, coffin lowered, folks standin’ ’round fur a final prayer. To all appearances everything was goin’ first rate. But the sexton hadn’t more than picked up his shovel, easy-like, when out comes a whistle, clear as a fog horn. I opened my eyes quick and looked down. Thar was Gram, poppin’ out like a jack-in-the-box, lid swung wide open and both hands reachin’ fur the dirt the sexton was shovellin’ in. Yes, m’am! Ye never saw dirt fly in all your born days the way Gram made it fly. At the rate she was goin’, I knew we’d be standin’ thar twell Doomsday, gittin’ her buried. “Everybody else was prayin’ hard along with the parson, and he was ’most to the Resurrection. I knew somethin’ had to be done quick, so in I jumped. I slapped the dirt out of her hands hard like you would with a child and says I, ‘Land o’ goodness, Gram, what ails ye? We’ve fetched ye along to what the Bible calls your last restin’ place. All we boys is askin’ of ye now is to keep quiet and rest twell Jedgment Day.’ “The words warn’t more’n out afore I knew I’d said the wrong thing. She didn’t lay any more store ’bout this eternal restin’ than what ye would, settin’ thar fingerin’ them flies. She give me the most pitiful look ye ever saw on a human face. It said, plain as daylight, ‘Zeb, lug me back home and let me git to work ag’in.’