She had been trying, poor Nannie! to make up her mind about many small, crowding affairs incident to the situation. In these weeks since Mrs. Maitland's death, Nannie, for the first time in her life, found herself obliged to answer questions. Harris asked them: "You ain't a-goin' to be livin' here, Miss Nannie; 'tain't no use to fill the coal-cellar, is it?" Miss White asked them: "Your Mamma's clothes ought to be put in camphor, dear child, or else given away; which do you mean to do?" Blair asked them: "When will you move out of this terrible house, Nancy dear?" A dozen times a day she was asked to make up her mind, she whose mind had always been made up for her! That hot Sunday morning when Elizabeth was hurrying down to Shantytown with the lightning flickering in her clouded eyes, Nannie, owing to Miss White's persistence about camphor, had gone into Mrs. Maitland's room to look over her things. Oh, these "things"! These pitiful possessions that the helpless dead must needs leave to the shrinking disposal of those who are left! How well every mourner knows them, knows the ache of perplexity and dismay that comes with the very touch of them. It is not the valuables that make grief shrink,--they settle themselves; such-and-such books or jewels or pieces of silver belong obviously to this or that side of the family. But what about the dear, valueless, personal things that neither side of the family wants? Things treasured by the silent dead because of some association unknown, perhaps, to those who mourn. What about these precious, worthless things? Mrs. Maitland had no personal possessions of intrinsic value, but she had her treasures. There was a little calendar on her bureau; it was so old that Nannie could not remember when it had not been there hanging from the slender neck of a bottle of German cologne. She took it up now, and looked at the faded red crescents of the new moon; how long ago that moon had waxed and waned! "She loved it," Nannie said to herself, "because Blair gave it to her." Standing on the bureau was the row of his photographs; on each one his mother had written his age and the date when the picture had been taken. In the disorder of the top drawer, tumbled about among her coarse handkerchiefs, her collars, her Sunday black kid gloves, were relics of her son's babyhood: a little green morocco slipper, with a white china button on the ankle-band; a rubber rattle, cracked and crumbling.... What is one to do with things like these? Burn them, of course. There is nothing else that can be done. Yet the mourner shivers when the flame touches them, as though the cool fingers of the dead might feel the scorch! Poor, frightened Nannie was the last person who could light such a holy fire; she took them up--the slipper or the calendar, and put them down again. "Poor Mamma!" she said over and over. Then she saw a bunch of splinters tied together with one of Blair's old neckties; she held it in her hand for a minute before she