It just seemed as if I must tell what I thought, and I felt better, not so full and restless after I had finished.
All of us were alike about that.

At that minute I knew mother was humming, as she did a dozen times a day: "I think when I read that sweet story of old, When Jesus was here among men How He called little children as lambs to His fold, I should like to have been with Him then." Lucy would be rocking her baby and singing, "Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber." Candace's favourite she made up about her man who had been killed in the war, when they had been married only six weeks, which hadn't given her time to grow tired of him if he hadn't been "all her fancy painted." She arranged the words like "Ben Battle was a soldier bold," and she sang them to suit herself, and cried every single minute: "They wrapped him in his uniform, They laid him in the tomb, My aching heart I thought 'twould break, But such was my sad doom." Candace just loved that song.

She sang it all the time.

Leon said our pie always tasted salty from her tears, and he'd take a bite and smile at her sweetly and say: "How UNIFORM you get your pie, Candace!" May's favourite was "Joy Bells." Father would be whispering over to himself the speech he was preparing to make at the next prayer-meeting.
We never could learn his speeches, because he read and studied so much it kept his head so full, he made a new one every time.

You could hear Laddie's deep bass booming the "Bedouin Love Song" for a mile; this minute it came rolling across the corn: "Open the door of thy heart, And open thy chamber door, And my kisses shall teach thy lips The love that shall fade no more Till the sun grows cold, And the Stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!" I don't know how the Princess stood it.