I was all by myself in the house.
I set down in my clock-room, about three in the arternoon, an' there I
set. I didn't git no supper. I couldn't. I set there an' heard the
clock tick. Byme-by it struck seven, an' that waked me up. I thought
I'd gone crazy. The figgers on the wall-paper provoked me most to
death; an' that red-an'-white tidy I made, the winter I was laid up,
seemed to be talkin' out loud. I got up an' run outdoor jest as fast as
I could go. I run out behind the house an' down the cart-path to that
pile o' rocks that overlooks the lake; an' there I got out o' breath
an' dropped down on a big rock. An' there I set, jest as still as I'd
been settin' when I was in the house."
Here a little girl stirred in her seat, and her mother leaned forward
and shook her, with alarming energy. "I never was so hard with Mary L.
afore," she explained the next day, "but I was as nervous as a witch. I
thought, if I heard a pin drop, I should scream."
"I dunno how long I set there," went on Hannah Prime, "but byme-by it
begun to come over me how still the lake was. 'Twas like glass; an' way
over where it runs in 'tween them islands, it burnt like fire. Then I
looked up a little further, to see what kind of a sky there was.
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