This whole matter interested me deeply, and likewise
compelled my sympathy for these homeless ones.
And it all seeming real, and I not knowing it was
a dream, I mentioned to one shrouded wanderer an idea
that had entered my head to publish an account of
this curious and very sorrowful exodus, but said also
that I could not describe it truthfully, and just
as it occurred, without seeming to trifle with a grave
subject and exhibit an irreverence for the dead that
would shock and distress their surviving friends.
But this bland and stately remnant of a former citizen
leaned him far over my gate and whispered in my ear,
and said:
“Do not let that disturb you. The community
that can stand such graveyards as those we are emigrating
from can stand anything a body can say about the neglected
and forsaken dead that lie in them.”
At that very moment a cock crowed, and the weird procession
vanished and left not a shred or a bone behind.
I awoke, and found myself lying with my head out
of the bed and “sagging” downward considerably—a
position favorable to dreaming dreams with morals
in them, maybe, but not poetry.
Note.—The reader is assured that if
the cemeteries in his town are kept in good order,
this Dream is not leveled at his town at all, but is
leveled particularly and venomously at the next town.
Repeated word for word as
I heard it—[Written about 1876]
It was summer-time, and twilight. We were sitting
on the porch of the farmhouse, on the summit of the
hill, and “Aunt Rachel” was sitting respectfully
below our level, on the steps-for she was our Servant,
and colored. She was of mighty frame and stature;
she was sixty years old, but her eye was undimmed
and her strength unabated. She was a cheerful,
hearty soul, and it was no more trouble for her to
laugh than it is for a bird to sing. She was
under fire now, as usual when the day was done.
That is to say, she was being chaffed without mercy,
and was enjoying it. She would let off peal after
of laughter, and then sit with her face in her hands
and shake with throes of enjoyment which she could
no longer get breath enough to express. It such
a moment as this a thought occurred to me, and I said:
“Aunt Rachel, how is it that you’ve lived
sixty years and never had any trouble?”
She stopped quaking. She paused, and there was
moment of silence. She turned her face over
her shoulder toward me, and said, without even a smile
her voice:
“Misto C-----, is you in ’arnest?”
It surprised me a good deal; and it sobered my manner
and my speech, too. I said:
“Why, I thought—that is, I meant—why,
you can’t have had any trouble. I’ve
never heard you sigh, and never seen your eye when
there wasn’t a laugh in it.”
She faced fairly around now, and was full earnestness.
