[Illustration:  She shrouds me for the agony]

But as cruel a death as freezing is, it doesn’t compare to the tortures of being melted.  Judy administers it to me and her faithful heart is so wrung with compassion that she perspires almost as much as I do.  She wrings a linen sheet out in a caldron of boiling water and shrouds me in it for the agony—­and then more and more blanket windings envelop me until I am like the mummy of some Egyptian giantess.  I have ice on the back of my neck and my forehead, and murder for the whole world in my heart.  Once I got so discouraged at the idea of having all this hades in this life that I mingled tears with the beads of perspiration that rolled down my cheeks, and she snatched me out of those steaming grave-clothes in less time than it takes to tell it, soused me in a tub of cold water, fed me a chicken wing and a hot biscuit and the information that I was “good-looking enough for anybody to eat up alive without all this foolishness,” all in a very few seconds.  Now I have to beg her to help me and I heard her tell her nephew, who does the gardening, that she felt like an undertaker with such goings-on.  At any rate, if it all kills me it won’t be my fault if anybody has to lie in saying that I was “beautiful in death”.

But now that more than a month has passed, I really don’t mind it so much.  I feel so good and strong and prancy all the time that I can’t keep from bubbling.  I have to smile at myself.

Then another thing that helps is Billy and his ball.  I never could really play with him before, but now I can’t help it.  But an awful thing happened about that yesterday.  We were in the garden playing over by the lilac bushes and Billy always beats me because when he runs to base he throws himself down and slides along on the grass on his little stomach as he sees the real players do over at the ball grounds.  Then all of a sudden, before I knew it, I just did the same thing, and we slid to the flower pot we use as a base together, each on his own stomach.  And what did Billy do but begin right there on the grass the kind of a tussle we always have in the big rocking-chair on the porch!  Over and over we rolled, Billy chuckling and squealing while I laughed myself all out of breath.  I’m glad I always would wear delicious petticoats, for there, looking right over my front fence, I discovered Judge Benton Wade.  I wish I could write down how I felt, for I never had that sensation before and I don’t believe I’ll ever have it again.

I have always thought that Judge Wade was really the most wonderful man in Hillsboro, not because he is a judge so young in life that there is only a white sprinkle in his lovely black hair that grows back off his head like Napoleon’s and Charles Wesley’s, but because of his smile, which you wait for so long that you glow all over when you get it.  I have seen him do it once or twice at his mother when he seats her in their pew at church and once at little Mamie Johnson when she gave him a flower through their fence as he passed by one day last week, but I never thought I should have one all to myself.  But there it was, a most beautiful one, long and slow and distinctly mine—­at least I didn’t think much of it was for Billie.  I sat up and blushed as red all over as I do when I first hit that tub of cold water.