“The darling!” said the little girl tenderly.  “I loved Rub-a-Dub so much; I love him still.  I do hope Iris will think him ’portant enough for a public funeral.”

“Look here,” said Mr. Delaney, interested in spite of himself, and forgetting all about the dinner which would be ready in a few minutes; “I’ll come right along with you to the dead-house; but I did not know, Di, that you kept an awful place of that sort in the garden.”

“Tisn’t awful,” said Diana.  “We has to keep a dead-house when we find dead things.  We keep all the dead ’uns we find there.  There aren’t as many as usual to-day—­only a couple of butterflies and two or three beetles, and a poor crushed spider.  And oh!  I forgot the toad that we found this morning.  It was awful hurt and Apollo had to kill it; he had to stamp on it and kill it; and he did not like it a bit.  Iris can’t kill things, nor can I, nor can Orion, so we always get Apollo to kill the things that are half dead—­to put them out of their misery, you know, father.”

“You seem to be a very wise little girl; but I am sure this cannot be at all wholesome work,” said the father, looking more bewildered and puzzled than ever.

Diana gazed gravely up at him.  She did not know anything about the work being wholesome or the reverse.  The dead creatures had to be properly treated, and had to be buried either privately or publicly—­that was essential—­nothing else mattered at all to her.

“As Rub-a-Dub is such a dear darlin’, I should not be s’prised if Iris did have a public funeral,” she commented.

“But what is the difference, Di?  Tell me,” said her father.

“Oh, father! you are ig’rant.  At a pwivate funeral the poor dead ’un is just sewn up in dock leaves and stuck into a hole in the cemetery.”

“The cemetery!  Good Heavens, child! do you keep a cemetery in the garden?”

“Indeed we does, father.  We have a very large one now, and heaps and heaps of gravestones.  Apollo writes the insipcron.  He is quite bothered sometimes.  He says the horrid work is give to him,—­carving the names on the stones and killing the half-dead ’uns,—­but course he has to do it ’cos Iris says so.  Course we all obey Iris.  When it is a pwivate funeral, the dead ’un is put into the ground and covered up, and it don’t have a gravestone; then of course, by and by, it is forgot.  You underland; don’t you, father?”

“Bless me if I do,” said Mr. Delaney, in a puzzled tone.

“But if it is a public funeral,” continued Diana, strutting boldly forward now, and throwing back her head in quite a martial attitude, “why, then it’s grand.  There is a box just like a coffin, and cotton wool—­we steal the cotton wool most times.  We know where Fortune has got a lot of it put away.  Iris does not think it quite right to steal, but the rest of us don’t mind.  And we have banners, and Orion plays the Jew’s harp, and I beat the drum, and Iris sings,