Judy administers it to me and her faithful heart is so
wrung with compassion that she perspires almost as much as I do. She
wrings a linen sheet out in a caldron of boiling water and shrouds me
in it for the agony--and then more and more blanket windings envelop me
until I am like the mummy of some Egyptian giantess. I have ice on the
back of my neck and my forehead, and murder for the whole world in my
heart. Once I got so discouraged at the idea of having all this hades
in this life that I mingled tears with the beads of perspiration that
rolled down my cheeks, and she snatched me out of those steaming
grave-clothes in less time than it takes to tell it, soused me in
a tub of cold water, fed me a chicken wing and a hot biscuit and the
information that I was "good-looking enough for _anybody_ to eat up
alive without all this foolishness," all in a very few seconds. Now I
have to beg her to help me and I heard her tell her nephew, who does the
gardening, that she felt like an undertaker with such goings-on. At any
rate, if it all kills me it won't be my fault if anybody has to lie in
saying that I was "beautiful in death".
But now that more than a month has passed, I really don't mind it so
much.
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