After his departure, Mrs. Sumfit sat and discoursed on deaths and burials, the certain end of all:  at least, she corrected herself, the deaths were.  The burials were not so certain.  Consequently, we might take the burials, as they were a favour, to be a blessing, except in the event of persons being buried alive.  She tried to make her hearers understand that the idea of this calamity had always seemed intolerable to her, and told of numerous cases which, the coffin having been opened, showed by the convulsed aspect of the corpse, or by spots of blood upon the shroud, that the poor creature had wakened up forlorn, “and not a kick allowed to him, my dears.”

“It happens to women, too, does it not, mother?” said Dahlia.

“They’re most subject to trances, my sweet.  From always imitatin’ they imitates their deaths at last; and, oh!” Mrs. Sumfit was taken with nervous chokings of alarm at the thought.  “Alone—­all dark! and hard wood upon your chest, your elbows, your nose, your toes, and you under heaps o’ gravel!  Not a breath for you, though you snap and catch for one—­worse than a fish on land.”

“It’s over very soon, mother,” said Dahlia.

“The coldness of you young women!  Yes; but it’s the time—­you feeling, trying for air; it’s the horrid ‘Oh, dear me!’ You set your mind on it!”

“I do,” said Dahlia.  “You see coffin-nails instead of stars.  You’d give the world to turn upon one side.  You can’t think.  You can only hate those who put you there.  You see them taking tea, saying prayers, sleeping in bed, putting on bonnets, walking to church, kneading dough, eating—­all at once, like the firing of a gun.  They’re in one world; you’re in another.”

“Why, my goodness, one’d say she’d gone through it herself,” ejaculated Mrs. Sumfit, terrified.

Dahlia sent her eyes at Rhoda.

“I must go and see that poor man covered.”  Mrs. Sumfit succumbed to a fit of resolution much under the pretence that it had long been forming.

“Well, and mother,” said Dahlia, checking her, “promise me.  Put a feather on my mouth; put a glass to my face, before you let them carry me out.  Will you?  Rhoda promises.  I have asked her.”

“Oh! the ideas of this girl!” Mrs. Sumfit burst out.  “And looking so, as she says it.  My love, you didn’t mean to die?”

Dahlia soothed her, and sent her off.

“I am buried alive!” she said.  “I feel it all—­the stifling! the hopeless cramp!  Let us go and garden.  Rhoda, have you got laudanum in the house?”

Rhoda shook her head, too sick at heart to speak.  They went into the garden, which was Dahlia’s healthfullest place.  It seemed to her that her dead mother talked to her there.  That was not a figure of speech, when she said she felt buried alive.  She was in the state of sensational delusion.  There were times when she watched her own power of motion curiously:  curiously stretched out her