“Was it a dream?” she asked herself as she cuddled close among the blankets. “Who knows what dreams are, anyhow? And is there anybody on the earth who can understand, define, or fathom the mystery of sleep?” In a few minutes she was fast asleep, and when she awoke it was morning.
“There are, there must be, other senses finer and more acute than our five physical ones,” she thought, as she crept from her bed, refreshed and wide awake.
The stars had paled, and the clear gray of the early dawn lit up the crests of the abounding hills.
The simple preparations for the funeral rites were made in silence. Men and women moved mechanically about the camp. The very cattle seemed to understand.
No casket was procurable, but every man in camp was ready to do all in his power to supply the need. Junipers of goodly size abounded in the neighboring woods. From two of these, felled for the purpose, thick puncheons were hewn to form a crude but stanch enclosure for the good woman’s final home. A grave was made, with hard labor, in the abounding sandstone, and the women lined its vault and edges with flattened boughs of evergreen, thus making an ideal resting-place for the still, white form, as beautiful in death as it had been in youth.
There was no prayer or sermon. The simple rites were about to close when Mary whispered to her father: “I have heard mother say she wanted us all to sing when they should be laying her away.” And the three eldest daughters of the peaceful dead and the storm-rent living sang with tremulous but not unmusical tones:—
“Oh, heaven is nearer than mortals think,
When they look with trembling dread
At the misty future that stretches on