Sometimes when the weather was fine, and the sun not too hot or too bright, old Henriette would put on a clean “josie,” and take her stick and hobble down to Josephine’s house to sit and talk of old times. She would get one of her grandchildren to help her down in the ditch, beside the highroad, where she insisted on walking to avoid the automobiles. When there had been rain Henriette got her feet all wet and muddy, down in the ditch that way. When the weather was dry the automobiles, shrieking by, sprayed her from head to foot with a fine white dust. Sometimes she got into nettles, or cockleburs or ants. And once a rattlesnake had glided across her path. Her grandchildren, who loved her, were dismayed and indignant. “Ain’t you ’shame, Gran’mamma, walking down in the ditch! How come you don’t let us take you to Josephine’s in the car?” But Henriette was afraid of cars. “It ain’t far. I ruther walk.” Josephine was always glad to see her. She would grunt and grumble and fetch out another shuck-bottomed chair. Then Josephine would make coffee. Josephine was rich. She owned her house and a little store that her son-in-law managed; and her married children lived with her, not she with them. She was very, very fat, what with easy living. How the two old women would gossip, the pleasant air stirred with their palmetto fans. Now in “American,” now in French; talk, talk, talk, talk. “Ain’t your tongues ever run down?” Josephine’s daughters-in-law would ask, laughing but respectful. What grand living and dying there used to be, back in steamboat days! It was like recalling a wedding festival or a Mardi Gras to look back to the yellow-fever scare of 1890. A funeral every day, and sometimes two. She and Josephine had had their hands full.... Shucks! the land was too healthy now, what with draining the swamps and such. The people were getting too uppity, outwitting death like that. Good thing after all that the automobiles bumped some of them off, else they never would quit the earth. What if some day folks should rise up and simply refuse to die! Well, what would God the Father have to say about that? Sometimes Henriette and Josephine would crack mild little jokes, slapping at the flies with their untiring fans. “I seen Toni last week, at the church. He’s looking feeble.” “_Mais non!_” (A cackle.) “He ain’t here for long.” Sometimes a shrill and sudden chorus of locusts swelled out of Josephine’s trees, and was gone. A sure sign of death. And the two old women would cross themselves. “I wonder who it is _this_ time!”