"'Well,' says I, sort o' sceptical, 'mebbe that's because you always plant 'em,' I says. 'I think it means that, too,' I told her. An' I knew well enough Calliope was one to plant her cedars herself. Cedars o' comfort, you know.
"I've seen a good many kinds o' mother-love—you do when you go round to houses like I do. But I never see anything like Calliope. Seems though she breathed that child for air. She always was one to pretend to herself, an' I knew well enough she'd figured it out as if this was their child that might 'a' been, long ago. She sort o' played mother—like you will; an' she lived her play. He was a real sweet little fellow, too. He was one o' them big-eyed kind that don't laugh easy, an' he was well-spoken, an' wonderful self-settled for a child o' seven. He was always findin' time for you when you thought he was doin' somethin' else—slidin' up to you an' puttin' up his hand in yours when you thought he was playin' or asleep. An' that was what he done that night when we set on the porch—comes slippin' out of his little bed an' sets down between us on the top step, in his little night-things.
"'Calvert, honey,' Calliope says, 'you must run back an' play dreams. Mother wants you to.'
"She'd taught him to call her mother—she'd had him about six months then—an' some thought that was queer to do, seein' Calliope was her age an' all. But I thought it was wonderful right.
"'I did play,' he says to her—he had a nice little way o' pressin' down hard with his voice on one word an' lettin' the next run off his tongue—'I did play dreams,' I rec'lect he says; 'I dreamed 'bout robbers. Ain't robbers distinct?' he says.
"I didn't know what he meant till Calliope laughs an' says, 'Oh, distinctly extinct!' I remembered it by the way the words kind o' crackled.
"By then he was lookin' up to the stars—his little mind always lit here an' there, like a grasshopper.
"'How can heaven begin,' he says, 'till everybody gets there?'
"Yes, he was a dear little chap. I like to think about him. An' I know when he says that, Calliope just put her arms around him, an' her head down, an' set sort o' rockin' back an' forth. An' she says:—
"'Oh, but I think it begins when we don't know.'