"Ouch! How you do hurt, Lily-Ann!"
"That's because it's so curly. See that long, beautiful one. I can't hardly get my comb through!"
I sighed blissfully with my eyes full of tears, and wondered when my mother would notice the change in her little girl, for, indeed, something must have happened to my hair, judging from the jerks.
It was Lily-Ann again who taught me how to catch sparrows by throwing salt on their tails. I ran about very hot and eager all one morning, and ended by feeling rather foolish, for not a bird would be caught, though I crept persistently on their track, always sure that the next time I should be successful. Still, I did not bear any grudge against Lily-Ann. It was not her fault that I was unfortunate, and then, too, she was very sympathetic.
"Why, my cousin caught one only yesterday!" she cried, in astonishment. "But then she is older than you are. And so smart! She turned a horsehair into a snake once. Did you ever do that, ma'am?"
"No," I answered, doubtfully; and immediately added, with growing enthusiasm, "oh, I should so like to do that!"
The end of it was that a faint suspicion which had crept upon me after the sparrow episode was quenched in the zeal with which I set myself to the awful task of raising snakes by the wholesale. There was always a touch of dread in the eagerness with which I visited the snake incubator,—a rusty pan half-filled with water, and hidden in a secret space behind the lilac bush. Little by little the horror of the situation so overcame me that I hurriedly weeded the horsehairs out; but the six that remained were the finest and longest which I could find, destined, I could easily expect from their size, to become boa-constrictors.
I believed everything that Lily-Ann told me. Up to that time there had never been occasion for me to question any one's truth, nor had there been anything of which to be afraid. Now I learned of a new world that lay about me,—the Land of the Dark,—in which familiar furniture played wild pranks, and shadows came to have a very terrible meaning.
"After you go to bed at night," Lily-Ann said, impressively, holding up a fat forefinger, "there are Things that come out and run all about the floor! Under the chairs and under the bed they creep around. Especially under the bed. If you should let your hand hang down, a Thing would take it and shake it!"
I peered at her from out the shelter of the bed-clothes, for I was in bed when this was first related, and she was sitting by me until I should go to sleep.