She paused a moment, and then began dancing up and down in her red shoes over the coloured leaves. "I'd like to play—play—play all the time!" she sang, whirling, a vivid little figure, around, the crumbling vault.
The next minute she caught up the puppy in her arms and hugged him passionately before she turned away.
"His name is Samuel!" she called back over her shoulder as she ran out of the churchyard.
When she had gone down the short flight of steps and into the wide street, I tucked Samuel under my arm, and lugged him, not without inward misgivings, into the kitchen, where my mother stood at the ironing-board, with one foot on the rocker of Jessy's cradle.
"Ma," I began in a faltering and yet stubborn voice, "I've got a pup."
My mother's foot left the rocker, and she turned squarely on me, with a smoking iron half poised above the garment she had just sprinkled on the board.
"Whar did he come from?" she demanded, and moistened the iron with the thumb of her free hand.
"I got him in the churchyard. His name is Samuel."
For a moment she stared at the two of us in a stony silence. Then her face twitched as if with pain, the perplexed and anxious look appeared in her eyes, and her mouth relaxed.
"Wall, he's ugly enough to be named Satan," she said, "but I reckon if you want to you may put him in a box in the back yard. Give him that cold sheep's liver in the safe and then you come straight in and comb yo' head. It looks for all the world like a tousled straw stack."