She opened her hand, and in it nestled the canary.
Chronology had no meaning for Sara. She jumped up and down and clapped her hands.
"You see, I brang it back! You see, I brang it back!"
"Mrs. Painter," said Grandma, and her tone was not without bitterness, "it was you, I think, who suggested burning gray hairs?"
"Oh, I've burned bunches of 'em!" cried Sara.
"It was my switch she burned," Grandma announced in a voice which held dry disapproval. "She burned it to bring your bird to life."
Mrs. Painter indecorously leaned against one of the trees which flanked the entrance of her yard and laughed. She laughed until she shook through her whole vast person.
"Oh, dear, dear, dear!" she cried. "What will that child do next?"
The sense of injury which had been suppressed in Mrs. Marcey's breast here burst forth.
"Allow me to say," she enunciated, "that I think this filling of children's heads with nonsense can sometimes pass the limit, and had it been your switch you might have seen less humor in this. I'm not going to darken your doors again, Alice, as long as this nonsense is permitted to go on. I don't relish children who talk about no other thing than witches and specters, banshees, norns, and elephant-faced monstrosities. If you think it's nice for a little girl of Sara's age to claim to possess Moloch and Juggernaut—well, Alice, I don't. To my certain knowledge some of Robert's gods were not only bloodthirsty but worse."
A private house was no fit abode for the gods of antiquity, Alice reflected. They should stay in their temple or museums.
