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“You wouldn’t know if I told you,” said Great-Aunt Eliza, coolly, putting her microscope away and finishing off her pudding.

When at last, just before they were all going back to town again, Great-Aunt Eliza invited the children to climb the ladder with her and see the stars through her telescope, they were so awed they looked at each other like strangers, and did not exchange a word. Miranda saw only a great pale flaring disk of cold light, but she knew it was the moon and called out in pure rapture, “Oh, it’s like another world!”

“Why, of course, child,” said Great-Aunt Eliza, in her growling voice, but kindly, “other worlds, a million other worlds.”

“Like this one?” asked Miranda, timidly.

“Nobody knows, child….”

“Nobody knows, nobody knows,” Miranda sang to a tune in her head, and when the others walked on, she was so dazzled with joy she fell back by herself, walking a little distance behind Great-Aunt Eliza’s swinging lantern and her wide-swinging skirts. They took the dewy path through the fig grove, much like the one in town, with the early dew bringing out the sweet smell of the milky leaves. They passed a fig tree with low hanging branches, and Miranda reached up by habit and touched it with her fingers for luck. From the earth beneath her feet came a terrible, faint troubled sound.”Weep weep, weep weep …” murmured a little crying voice from the smothering earth, the grave.

Miranda bounded like a startled pony against the back of Great-Aunt Eliza’s knees, crying out, “Oh, oh, oh, wait …”

“What on earth’s the matter, child?”

Miranda seized the warm snuffy hand held out to her and hung on hard.”Oh, there’s something saying ‘weep weep’ out of the ground!”

Great-Aunt Eliza stooped, put her arm around Miranda and listened carefully, for a moment.”Hear them?” she said.”They’re not in the ground at all. They are the first tree frogs, means it’s going to rain,” she said, “weep weep — hear them?”

Miranda took a deep trembling breath and heard them. They were in the trees. They walked on again, Miranda holding Great-Aunt Eliza’s hand.

“Just think,” said Great-Aunt Eliza, in her most scientific voice, “when tree frogs shed their skins, they pull them off over their heads like little shirts, and they eat them. Can you imagine? They have the prettiest little shapes you ever saw — I’ll show you one some time under the microscope.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Miranda remembered finally to say through her fog of bliss at hearing the tree frogs sing, “Weep weep …”

THE GRAVE

The grandfather, dead for more than thirty years, had been twice disturbed in his long repose by the constancy and possessiveness of his widow. She removed his bones first to Louisiana and then to Texas as if she had set out to find her own burial place, knowing well she would never return to the places she had left. In Texas she set up a small cemetery in a corner of her first farm, and as the family connection grew, and oddments of relations came over from Kentucky to settle, it contained at last about twenty graves. After the grandmother’s death, part of her land was to be sold for the benefit of certain of her children, and the cemetery happened to lie in the part set aside for sale. It was necessary to take up the bodies and bury them again in the family plot in the big new public cemetery, where the grandmother had been buried. At last her husband was to lie beside her for eternity, as she had planned.

The family cemetery had been a pleasant small neglected garden of tangled rose bushes and ragged cedar trees and cypress, the simple flat stones rising out of uncropped sweet-smelling wild grass. The graves were lying open and empty one burning day when Miranda and her brother Paul, who often went together to hunt rabbits and doves, propped their twenty-two Winchester rifles carefully against the rail fence, climbed over and explored among the graves. She was nine years old and he was twelve.