“I’d like to get into the—­trunk as soon as possible.  There is something I want to look up in my chicken book,” I said before I seated myself in the midst of one of the battles that raged around Ilium.

“Nancy, my dear, you will find that Rufus has arranged your Grandmother Craddock’s room for you, and Mary Beesley came over to see that all was in order,” said Uncle Cradd, coming and taking my face into his long, lean old hands.  “God bless you, my dear, and keep you in His care here in the home of your forefathers.  Good-night!” After an absent-minded kiss from father I was dismissed with a Sanskrit blessing from somewhere in the valley of the Euphrates up into my bedroom in the valley of Old Harpeth.

If I had discovered the shadow of tradition in the rest of the old house, I walked into the very depths of them as I entered the bedroom of my foremothers.  Deep crimson coals of fire were in a squat fireplace, and a last smoldering log of some kind of fragrant wood broke into fragments and sent up a little gust of blue and gold flame as if in celebration of my arrival.  There was the remnant of a candle burning on a small table beside a bed that was very near, if not quite, five feet high, beside which were steps for the purposes of ascension.  All the rest of the room was in a blur of lavender-scented darkness, and I only saw that both side walls folded down and were lit with the deep old gables, through the open windows of which young moon rays were struggling to help light the situation for me.  As I looked at that wide, puffy old bed, with a blur of soft colors in its quilt and the valance around its posts and tester, I suddenly became as utterly weary as a child who sees its mother’s arms outstretched at retiring time.  I don’t know how I got out of my clothes and into my lace and ribbons, with only the flickering candle and the dying log to see by, but in less time than I ever could have dreamed might be consumed in the processes of going to bed I climbed the little steps and dived into the soft bosom of the old four-poster.

“God bless me and keep me in His care here in my grandmother’s bed,” I murmured after the invocation of Uncle Cradd, and that is all I knew after the first delicious sink and soft huddling of my body between sheets that felt as if they must be rich silk and smelled of old lavender.

And then came a dream—­a most lovely dream.  I was at the opera in Gale Beacon’s box, and Mr. G. Bird was out on the stage singing that glorious coo in the aria in Saint-Saens’ “Samson and Delilah,” and I was trying to answer him.  Suddenly I was wide awake sitting up in a billowed softness, while moonlight of a different color was sifting in through the gable windows and the most lovely calling notes were coming in on its beams.  Without a moment’s hesitation I answered in about six notes of that Delilah song which was the only sound ready in my mind.  Then I listened and I am not sure that I heard a reedy laugh under my window as just the two notes succeeding the ones I had given forth came in on the dawn beams.  Then all was as still and quiet as the hush of midnight.