’Grown people didn’t mind it, but it most always made the children cry, it was so sort of scary.  She tried packing it in raw cotton, but it wouldn’t work, somehow—­the cotton would get loose and stick out and look so kind of awful that the children couldn’t stand it no way.  She was always dropping it out, and turning up her old dead-light on the company empty, and making them oncomfortable, becuz she never could tell when it hopped out, being blind on that side, you see.  So somebody would have to hunch her and say, “Your game eye has fetched loose.  Miss Wagner dear” —­and then all of them would have to sit and wait till she jammed it in again—­wrong side before, as a general thing, and green as a bird’s egg, being a bashful cretur and easy sot back before company.  But being wrong side before warn’t much difference, anyway; becuz her own eye was sky-blue and the glass one was yaller on the front side, so whichever way she turned it it didn’t match nohow.

’Old Miss Wagner was considerable on the borrow, she was.  When she had a quilting, or Dorcas S’iety at her house she gen’ally borrowed Miss Higgins’s wooden leg to stump around on; it was considerable shorter than her other pin, but much she minded that.  She said she couldn’t abide crutches when she had company, becuz they were so slow; said when she had company and things had to be done, she wanted to get up and hump herself.  She was as bald as a jug, and so she used to borrow Miss Jacops’s wig —­Miss Jacops was the coffin-peddler’s wife—­a ratty old buzzard, he was, that used to go roosting around where people was sick, waiting for ’em; and there that old rip would sit all day, in the shade, on a coffin that he judged would fit the can’idate; and if it was a slow customer and kind of uncertain, he’d fetch his rations and a blanket along and sleep in the coffin nights.  He was anchored out that way, in frosty weather, for about three weeks, once, before old Robbins’s place, waiting for him; and after that, for as much as two years, Jacops was not on speaking terms with the old man, on account of his disapp’inting him.  He got one of his feet froze, and lost money, too, becuz old Robbins took a favorable turn and got well.  The next time Robbins got sick, Jacops tried to make up with him, and varnished up the same old coffin and fetched it along; but old Robbins was too many for him; he had him in, and ’peared to be powerful weak; he bought the coffin for ten dollars and Jacops was to pay it back and twenty-five more besides if Robbins didn’t like the coffin after he’d tried it.  And then Robbins died, and at the funeral he bursted off the lid and riz up in his shroud and told the parson to let up on the performances, becuz he could not stand such a coffin as that.  You see he had been in a trance once before, when he was young, and he took the chances on another, cal’lating that if he made the trip it was money in his pocket, and if he missed fire he couldn’t lose a cent.