"Then he will be burned forever and ever and ever, won't he?" I said. "I suppose he will," she said, and taking out her handkerchief, she wiped her eyes sadly. "Do you think it will be real fire and that it will smart just as it does when we burn our fingers?" I asked her. "Maybe worse," Theodora replied, again wiping her eyes. "But sometimes I cannot believe that it will be all the time, night and day, year after year. Maybe it is wicked to hope it will not be, but I do want to think that _they would stop sometimes_. Universalists teach that nobody will be punished at all after they die; but Gram thinks they are not real Christians. Our folks all believe that the wicked will be punished forever, and the Bible does say so, I suppose. Grandmother says that all the great Bible scholars agree that the wicked will be punished." "What does Ad think?" I asked, at length. "I don't know. I'm afraid that he doesn't think at all," replied Theodora. "The thing I do not like in Cousin Addison is that he will never take a serious view of these important questions. The time he had the measles, he was very sick one day, and I said that I hoped that his mind was at peace. He looked at me as if he were a little frightened at first, for I suppose he thought that I thought that he was going to die, for I did begin in a sort of clumsy way. His head was swelled nearly as big again as it ought to have been, and he looked very queer about the eyes. 'O Doad!' he exclaimed, 'please do talk of things that you know something about.' But of course he felt peevish, being so sick." "I suppose he did," said I. "But isn't it awful that everybody's got to die--and no getting away from it?" "Yes, it does make any one feel dreadfully sad," Theodora assented. "But the good will be better off." I did not gain much comfort from the conversation, however, and for years thereafter the thought of death filled me with the same choking sense of terror. CHAPTER XVI WOOD-CHUCKS IN THE CLOVER--ADDISON'S STRATAGEM Creameries with ice-chests were as yet unheard of in the rural counties of Maine in 1866. At the old farm, all of the dairy milk was set in pans on the clean, cool cellar bottom. As the warm mornings of midsummer drew on, Gram was usually up by five o'clock, attending to her cream and butter; and about this time, as we issued drowsily forth, in response to the Old Squire's early rap, we were repeatedly startled at hearing a sudden eldritch exclamation which was half scream, at the foot of the bulkhead stairs. "What's the matter down there, Ruth?" the Old Squire would exclaim. "Dear me, I've stepped on that hateful toad again!" Gram would reply. "It's always under foot there! Do, Ellen, you get the tongs and carry that toad off again. Carry him away out to the foot of the garden, below the currant bushes. I don't see how he is forever getting back to the foot of those stairs! It gives me such a start, to put my foot on him!"