When people passed by and saw the blue cloth on the door, they thought the mother-in-law, who was old, must be dead.
The second day Woo-Liu-Mai went to her own mother’s home, which was some distance from there, and said, “Mother, my child is dead. Just as the New Year Day came, in the morning early, before the sunrise—so he died.”
Woo-Liu-Mai’s sisters, cousins, and neighbors came to comfort her, because they were sorry. She was now both a widow and childless. In China it is bad to be a widow, but to be both widowed and childless makes of a woman almost an outcast.
One favorite cousin, Woo-Lau-Chan, a very good woman who loved Woo-Liu-Mai like a sister, had a baby just the age of the one who had died, and when she heard the news, she thought much in her heart of her cousin’s great sorrow. “How can my cousin find comfort in life any more?” she said in her mind. “She lost her husband when so young and now she has lost her only child. The first happiness lost—the second happiness lost. A widowed woman has nothing more to expect in life. Oh, I want to do something for her. Clothes, money, bracelets, jewelry, can not comfort her without her child.”
Woo-Lau-Chan then dressed herself and took up [[52]]her sleeping child and ran to the house where the dead baby lay. She was brave and went into the dark empty room, and no one saw her. She never thought or cared about the bad luck it might bring, nor of herself in any way. She thought only of the great sorrow of the dead child’s mother.
The still body lay on the floor; she took off its clothes and put them on her own baby, and she waited until he had had milk and slept again; then she laid him on the floor and took the body of the dead child and went out into the great forest, where she left it.
She then went back to her cousin with a happy smiling face and said, “Woo-Liu-Mai, I wish you would come with me to your home.”
“No,” said Woo-Liu-Mai sadly, “I will go to-morrow and bury my child. I will stay here until then.”
“But you can not wait until to-morrow. Come with me now. The gods told me in a dream last night that your child would live again. Kwoh-King may now be crying for milk. Come, go now.”
But Woo-Liu-Mai said, “No, it can not be. You tell me what is not true. I will go to-morrow to bury my dead.”