All the women did not use the shovel, some of them took up handsful of soil and let it gently filter through their fingers into the open vault; and finally three children, somewhere about ten or eleven years of age, followed the example of their elders and added their little share to the brown coverlid of the dead.

He began to think of his mother, and of all the comforts of his lost homethe bread and milk when he was hungry, the warm clothing, and the soft little bed with its snowy white coverlid in which he had slept so sweetly every night.

Without a thought for the morrow he jumped into it, pulled the coverlid over his head and went fast asleep.