(When we die).
We’ll all go to glory—We’ll all go to glory
We’ll all go to glory when we die.”
There was something rousing about that last. When one has been told a thing about six times with much vehemence, one begins to believe it.
But her resources did not end with the religious. Bless you, no! When she was peeling the potatoes she gained inspirations for ghost stories.
“It was as black as pitch,” she would say, in a low voice. “And as he was passing by the oak tree he saw something ghastly swinging from the branches. It was the body of a woman who had been murdered twenty years ago. And he saw her throat was cut. And all the way home he heard footsteps following him. And when he got there he fell down dead.”
It was gruesome, as of course it was meant to be. But the teller had her reward. Some three or four pairs of blue eyes were all fixed on her, mouths open, breath coming in short gasps. And then, of course, she had the satisfaction of knowing that the children dared not go to bed at night, and the still greater satisfaction of knowing that they were too ashamed to own up to their fear.
The most wonderful part about her was that she would stop quite calmly in the most awful part to remove an eye from the potato she was peeling, and then she would actually say, “Where did I get to? oh, yes.” There was something uncanny about that girl, she had so much sang-froid, and was never frightened at the workings of her own brain, as so many of us are.
But if you were to be told all the marvellous deeds she did it would fill a book. In the end she was married and went to live in America. She married a Captain in the Salvation Army. Probably she fascinated him as much as she had the farmer’s children.
But it would be a pity, whilst one is about it, not to mention another of her great charms. On a Sunday afternoon, when the work was all done and she was dressed in her best, and wearing a silver locket, having inside it the picture of her young man, the Captain, she would begin to rap, in a peculiar way, upon the kitchen table with her nails, and this is what she said, keeping absolute time with the aforementioned knockers,—