Speed Nell
Tripping with the Tucker Twins

CHAPTER IX
CHURCHYARDS

Graveyards seemed a strange place to want to spend the afternoon after our experience of the morning, but the cheerful Zebedee always made for them, just as a sunbeam seems to be hunting up the dark and gloomy corners.

"Saint Michael's first, as that is the nearest," suggested Louis.

We entered the churchyard through massive old iron gates, and, turning to the right, followed Louis to perhaps the most unique grave stone in the world: the headboard of an old cedar bed. It is a relic of 1770. The story goes that the woman buried there insisted that her husband should go to no trouble or expense to mark her grave. She said that she had been very comfortable in that same bed and would rest very easy under it and that it would soon rot away and leave her undisturbed. She little dreamed that more than a century later that old cedar bed would be preserved, seemingly in some miraculous way, and be intact while stones, reverently placed at the same time, were crumbling away.

"It seems like John Keats' epitaph: 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.' Keats thought he was dead to the world, and see how he lives; and this poor woman's grave is the first one that tourists are taken to see," I mused aloud.

"I have often thought about this woman," said Claire, in her light, musical voice. "I have an idea that she must have been very hard-worked and perhaps longed for a few more minutes in bed every morning, and maybe the husband routed her out, and when she died perhaps he felt sorry he had not given her more rest."

"You hear that, Page?" asked Dum. "You had better have some mercy on me now. I may 'shuffle off this mortal coil' at any minute, and you will be so sorry you didn't let me sleep just a little while longer." (It had been my job ever since I started to room with the Tucker twins to be the waker-up. It was a thankless job, too, and no sinecure.) "See that my little brass bed is kept shiny, Zebedee dear."

"I wonder why it is that no one ever seems to feel very sad or quiet in old, old graveyards?" I asked, all of us laughing at Dum's brass bed.

"I think it is because all the persons who suffered at the death of the persons buried there are dead, too. No one feels very sorry for the dead; it is the living that are left to mourn. Old cemeteries are to me the most peaceful and cheerful spots one can visit," said Zebedee, leaning over to decipher some quaint epitaph.

"I think so, too!" exclaimed Claire, who had fitted herself into our crowd with delightful ease. "New graves are the ones that break my heart."

Louis turned away to hide his emotion. He had been too near to the Great Divide that very morning for talk of new-made graves and the sorrow of loved ones not to move him.

There was much of interest in that old burying ground, and Louis proved an excellent cicerone. He told us that the church was started in 1752; that the bells and organ and clock were imported from England, and that the present organ had parts of the old organ incorporated in it. The bells were seized during the Revolution and shipped and sold in England, where they were purchased by a former Charleston merchant and shipped back again. During the Civil War they were sent to Columbia for safekeeping, but were so badly injured when Columbia was burned that they had to be again sent to England and recast in the original mold. They chimed out the hour while Louis was telling us about them as though to prove to us their being well worth all the trouble to which they had put the worthy citizens of Charleston.

"Saint Philip's next, while we are in the churchly spirit," said Louis; "and then the Huguenot church."

St. Philip's was a little older than St. Michael's. The chimes for that church were used for making cannon for the Confederacy, and for lack of funds up to the present time they have not been replaced. On top of the high steeple is a beacon light by which the ships find their way into the harbor.

We had noticed at the hotel, both at our very early breakfast and at luncheon, a very charming couple who had attracted us greatly and who, in turn, seemed interested in us. The man was a scholarly person with kind, brown eyes, a very intelligent, comely countenance, and a tendency to baldness right on top that rather added to his intellectual appearance. His wife was quite pretty, young, and with a look of race and breeding that was most striking. Her hair was red gold, and she had perhaps the sweetest blue eyes I had ever beheld. Her eyes just matched her blue linen shirtwaist. What had attracted me to the couple was not only their interesting appearance, but the fact that they seemed to have such a good time together. They talked not in the perfunctory way that married persons often do, but with real spirit and interest.

As we entered the cemetery of St. Philip's, across the street from the church, we met this couple standing by the sarcophagus of the great John C. Calhoun. The lady bowed to us sweetly, acknowledging, as it were, having seen us in the hotel. We of course eagerly responded, delighted at the encounter. We had discussed them at length, and almost decided they were bride and groom; at least Tweedles had, but I thought not. They were too much at their ease to be on their first trip together, I declared, and of course got called a would-be author for my assertion.

"I hear there is a wonderful portrait of Calhoun by Healy in the City Hall," said the gentleman to Zebedee, as he courteously moved for us to read the inscription on the sarcophagus.

"Yes, so I am told, but this young man who belongs to this interesting city can tell us more about it," and in a little while all of us were drawn into conversation with our chance acquaintances.

Louis led us through the cemetery, telling us anything of note, and then we followed him to the Huguenot church, accompanied by our new friends.

A Huguenot church has stood on the site of the present one since 1667. Many things have happened to the different buildings, but the present one, an edifice of unusual beauty and dignity, has remained intact since 1845. The preacher, a dear old man of over eighty, who is totally blind, has been pastor of this scanty flock for almost fifty years. He now conducts the service from memory, and preaches wonderful, simple sermons straight from his kind old heart.

"Oh, Edwin, see what wonderful old names are on these tablets," enthused the young wife – "Mazyck, Ravenel, Porcher, de Sasure, Huger, Cazanove, L'Hommedieu, Marquand, Gaillard – "

"Yes, dear, they sound like an echo from the Old World."

"This Gaillard is our great, great grandfather, isn't he, Louis?" asked Claire. "My brother knows so much more about such things than I do."

"Oh, is your name Gaillard?"

And then the introductions followed, Zebedee doing the honors, naming all of us in turn; and then the gentleman told us that his name was Edwin Green and introduced his wife.

I fancy Claire and Louis had not been in the habit of picking up acquaintances in this haphazard style, and the sensation was a new and delightful one to them. The Tuckers and I always did it. We talked to the people we met on trains and in parks, and many an item for my notebook did I get in this way. Zebedee says he thinks it is all right just so you don't pick out some flashy flatterer. Of course we never did that, but confined our chance acquaintances to women and children or nice old men, whose interest was purely fatherly. Making friends as we had with Louis was different, as there was nothing to do but help him; and his sex and age were not to be considered at such a time.

"Are you to be in Charleston long?" asked Zebedee of Mr. Green.

"I can't tell. We are fascinated by it, but long to get out of the hotel and into some home."

"If I knew of some nice quiet place, I would put my girls there for a few days while I run over to Columbia on business. I can't leave them alone in the hotel."

"I should love to look after them, if you would trust me," said Mrs. Green, flushing for fear Zebedee might think her pushing.

"Trust you! Why, you are too kind to make such an offer!" exclaimed Zebedee.

"We have some friends who have just opened their house for – for – guests," faltered Claire. "They live only a block from us, and are very lovely ladies. We heard only this morning that they are contemplating taking someone into their home." Tweedles and I exchanged glances; mine was a triumphant one. The would-be author had hit the nail on the head again. "Their name is Laurens." I knew it would be before Claire spoke.

"Oh, Miss Gaillard, if you could introduce us to those ladies we would be so grateful to you!" said Zebedee. "You would like to stay there, wouldn't you, girls?"

"Yes! Yes!"

"And Mrs. Green perhaps will decide to go there, too, and she will look after you, will you not, Mrs. Green?"

"I should be so happy to if the girls would like to have me for a chaperone."

"Oh, we'd love it! We've never had a chaperone in our lives but once, and she got married," tweedled the twins.

And so our compact was made, and Claire promised to see the Misses Laurens in regard to our becoming her "paying guests."

Mr. Green, who, as we found out afterward, was a professor of English at the College of Wellington and had all kinds of degrees that entitled him to be called Doctor, seemed rather amused at his wife's being a chaperone.

"She seems to me still to be nothing but a girl herself," he confided to Zebedee, "although we have got a fine big girl of our own over a year old, whom we have left in the care of my mother-in-law while we have this much talked-of trip together."

"Oh, have you got a baby? Do you know, Dum and I just stood Page down that you were bride and groom!"

"Molly, do you hear that? These young ladies thought we were newlyweds."

"I didn't!"

"And why didn't you?" smiled the young wife.

"I noticed you gave separate orders at the table and did not have to pretend to like the same things. I believe a bride and groom are afraid to differ on even such a thing as food."

"Oh, Edwin, do you hear that? Do you remember the unmerciful teasing Kent gave you at Fontainbleu because you pretended to like the mustard we got on our roast beef in the little English restaurant, just because I like English mustard?"

"Yes, I remember it very well, and I also remember lots of other things at Fontainbleu besides the mustard."

Mrs. Green blushed such a lovely pink at her husband's words that we longed to hear what he did remember.

"Kent is my brother – Kent Brown."

"Oh! Oh!" tweedled the twins. "Are you Molly Brown of Kentucky?"

"Yes, I was Molly Brown of Kentucky."

"And did you go to Wellington?" I asked.

"Yes, and I still go there, as my husband has the chair of English at Wellington."

"Girls! Girls! To think of our meeting Molly Brown of Kentucky! We have been hearing of you all winter from our teacher of English at Gresham, Miss Ball."

"Mattie Ball! I have known her since my freshman year at college. Edwin, you remember Mattie Ball, do you not?"

"Of course I do. An excellent student! She had as keen an appreciation of good literature as anyone I know of."

"She used to tell us that she owed everything she knew to her professor of English at Wellington," said Dee, who knew how to say the right thing at the right time, and Professor Green's pleased countenance was proof of her tact.

Then Mrs. Green had to hear all about Miss Ball and the fire at Gresham, which Tweedles related with great spirit, laying rather too much stress on my bravery in arousing the school.

"I deserve no more credit than did the geese whose hissing aroused the Romans in ancient times," I declared. "Why don't you tell them how you got Miss Plympton out of the window in her pink pajamas?"

The Greens laughed so heartily at our adventures that we were spurred on to recounting other happenings, telling of the many scrapes we had got ourselves in. Claire listened in open-eyed astonishment.

"It must be lovely to go to boarding-school," she said wistfully.

"It sounds lovelier than it is. We tell about the scrapes and the fun, but there are lots of times when it is nothing but one stupid thing after another. It's lots lovelier just to be at home with your father."

Claire shook her head doubtfully, and, remembering her father, we did not wonder at her differing with Dum.

"I have always held that home was the place for girls until they were old enough for college," said Mrs. Green. "That is, if they mean to go to college."

"But we don't!"

Zebedee and Professor Green had walked on ahead. Louis was sticking close to Dee, so close that Dum whispered to me that he must think she had him on a leash. Claire and Dum and I were having the pleasure of flocking around Mrs. Green.

"You see, we haven't got a piece of mother among us, and we had to go somewhere, as Zebedee – that's our father, you know – had his hands so full of us he couldn't ply his trade of getting out newspapers. Dee and I are some improved since we first were sent off to school, and now that Gresham is burned, we don't want to break into a new school. I tell you, it is some job to break into a school. Page Allison lives in the country, and she had to go to boarding-school or not at all."

"Well, why don't you go to college now? Wellington would just suit you, I am sure."

"Somehow I have never been crazy to go to college. I want to do something else. You see, I want to model. I feel as though I just had to get my hands in clay and form things out of it."

"And you?" said the sweet young woman, turning to me.

This Molly Brown of Kentucky certainly had the charm of sympathy. You found yourself telling her all kinds of things that you just couldn't help telling her. She seemed so interested, and her eyes were so blue and so true.

"Oh, I mean to be a writer!" I blurted out. "That's the reason I don't want to go to college. If I am going to write, I had better just write, I think, and not wear myself to a frazzle over higher mathematics."

"That's the way I used to feel. The only good I could ever get out of that hated study was just knowing I had done my best. My best seemed so feeble by the side of the real mathematicians that it was a constant mortification to me. I used to call mathematics my hair shirt. No matter how well I got along in other things, I was always conscious of a kind of irritation that I was going to fail in that. I just did squeeze through in the end, and that was by dint of wet towels around my head and coaching and encouragement from my friends. I think it is quite natural to dislike a subject that always makes you appear at your worst. Certainly we are not fond of people who put us in that position!"

I might have known our new friend would hate mathematics. I have never yet been attracted very much by any woman who did get along very well in it, except, of course, Miss Cox. I don't mean to say that female mathematicians cannot be just as lovely and charming as any other females, but I mean that I have never hit it off with them, somehow.

"What are you going to write?" asked Claire.

"Write short stories and long novels, when I find myself. I'm still flopping around in a sea of words. Don't you write, Mrs. Green? It seems to me Miss Ball said you did."

"Yes, I write a little – that is, I write a lot, but I have published only a little. I send and send to magazine after magazine. Every mail is an event to me – either it brings back a manuscript or it doesn't bring one, and sometimes it brings an acceptance slip, and then I carry on like one demented. Edwin says he is jealous of the postman and wishes Uncle Sam would have women deliver the mail."

"It must be wonderful to get into a magazine. My only taste of it is seeing myself in print in our school paper. Don't you write poetry, Mrs. Green?"

"Well, I have melted into verse, but I think prose is more in my line. The first money I ever made was a prize for a real estate advertisement in poetry, and of course after that I thought that I must 'lisp in numbers' on all occasions; but it was always lisping. And you – do you write poetry, too?"

"Yes, she does," broke in Dum; "and Zebedee thinks it is bully poetry. He said he was astonished that she could do it. And he is a newspaper writer and knows."

"I am sure he does. Some day we will have a tournament of poetry, and you will show me yours and I will show you mine. And you, Miss Gaillard? Are you counting upon going to college?"

Mrs. Green turned to Claire, who had been very quiet as we strolled along Church Street, on our way to Washington Park, which is a small enclosure by the City Hall.

"Oh, no, I – I will not pursue my studies any more. I keep house for my father, who does not approve of higher education for women," and the girl sighed in spite of herself. "I could not go, anyhow," she continued, "as Louis and papa need me at home."

Not one word of lack of money, which we knew was an insurmountable obstacle with the Gaillards, but I believe a Charlestonian would as soon speak of lack of ancestry as lack of money. Money is simply something they don't mention except in the bosom of the family. They don't mention ancestry much, either; not nearly as much as Virginians do. They seem to take for granted that anyone they are on speaking terms with must be well born or how did they get to be on speaking terms?

The Gaillards left us at Washington Park as Claire thought she must hurry back to her papa, who no doubt by that time was in a fret and a fume over her long, unexplained absence. Mr. Gaillard was the type of man who thought a woman's place was in her home from morning until night, and any little excursion she might make from her home must be in pursuit of his, the male's, happiness. Claire promised to see the Misses Laurens and find out from them if we could get board in their very exclusive home. Louis asked to be allowed to take us to other points of interest on the morrow, and with feelings of mutual esteem we parted.

CHAPTER X
THE HEAVENLY VISION

That little park in the heart of Charleston is a very delightful spot. It is a tiny park, but every inch of it seems teeming with interest, historical and poetical. In the center is the shaft erected by the Washington Light Infantry to their dead in '61-'65. The obelisk is in three sections of granite, representing the three companies. On the steps of the square pedestal are cut the twelve great battles of the war.

Zebedee dared us to recite them, but we fell down most woefully, except Dum, who named all but Secessionville.

Little darkies were playing on the steps, running around the shaft and shouting with glee as they bumped their hard heads together and rolled down the steps.

"Black rascals!" exclaimed Zebedee. "If it had not been for you, that monument need never have been erected."

But the little imps kept up their game with renewed glee, hoping to attract the attention of the tourists. Tourists were simply made of pennies, in the minds of the Charleston pickaninnies. Seeing we had noticed them, they flocked to where we had settled ourselves on some benches facing the monument and began in their peculiar South Carolina lingo to demand something of us – what it was it took some penetration to discover. There were five of them, about the raggedest little monkeys I ever saw. Their clothes stayed on by some miracle of modesty, but every now and then a streak of shiny black flesh could be glimpsed through the interstices. (I got that word from Professor Green, which I put down in my notebook for safekeeping.)

"Do' white fo'ks wan' we-all sin' li'l' song?"

"What?" from all of us.

"Sin' li'l' song! La, la, la, tim chummy loo!" and the blackest and sassiest and most dilapidated of them all opened his big mouth with its gleaming teeth and let forth a quaint chant.

"Oh, sing us a little song?" and we laughed aloud.

"Why, yes, we do," assented Professor Green, "but don't get too close. The acoustics would be better from a short distance, I am sure."

"Edwin is enough of a Yankee not to like darkies coming too close," laughed Mrs. Green. "You know a Northerner's interest in the race is purely theoretical. When it comes right down to it, we Southerners are the only ones who really understand them. I remember what one of the leaders of the negroes said: 'A Northerner loves the negro but has no use for a nigger, while a Southerner can't stand the negro but will do anything on earth for a nigger.'"

"That's right, I believe," said Zebedee; "but I must say I agree with Doctor Green, and think under the circumstances that a short distance will help the acoustics."

The five song birds formed a half-circle a few feet from us, and, led by the sassy black one, poured forth their souls in melody. The leader seemed to be leader because he was the only one with shoes on. His shoes were ladies' buttoned shoes, much too long and on the wrong feet, which gave their proud possessor a peculiar twisted appearance. Having good black legs of his own, he needed no stockings.

"It must be a great convenience to be born with black legs," sighed Dee. "You can go bare-legged when you've a mind to, and if you should be so prissy as to wear stockings, when they get holes in them they wouldn't show."

The following is the song that the little boys sang, choosing it evidently from a keen sense of humor and appreciation of fun:

 
"How yer git on wid yer washin'?
'Berry well,' yer say?
Better charge dem Yankee big price
Fo' dey gits away.
Dey is come hyar fer de wedder,
Pockets full ob money.
Some one got ter do dey washin',
Glad it's me, my honey.
Wen I ca'y in de basket,
Eb'y week I laff
Des ter see dem plunkin' out
Dollah an' a ha'f.
Co'se I ain't cha'ge home fo'ks dat,
Eben cuff an' collah,
Tro' in wid dey udder clo's —
All wash fer a dollah.
Soon de Yankees will be gone,
An' jes de po' fo'ke here;
Cha'ge dem, honey, all yer kin
Ter las' yer trou' de year."
 

When they finished this song, which was given in a high, peculiar, chanting tune, the little boy of the shoes began to dance, cutting the pigeon wing as well as it had ever been done on a vaudeville stage, I am sure, while the other four patted with such spirit and in such excellent time that Zebedee got up and danced a little pas seul, and Mrs. Green declared it was all she could do to keep from joining him.

"I learned to jig long before I did to waltz," she said, "and I find myself returning to the wild when I hear good patting."

"So did I," I said; "Tweedles can pat as well as a darky. We will have a dancing match some day, too."

The minstrels were remunerated beyond their dreams of avarice, and cantered off joyfully to buy groun'-nut cakes from the old mauma on the corner, where she sat with her basket of goodies on her lap, waving her palmetto fan, between dozes, to scare away the flies.

"Who's the old cove over there with the Venus de Milo effect of arms?" asked Zebedee, pointing to a much-mutilated statue near the Meeting Street entrance of the park.

"Why, that's William Pitt. Louis Gaillard told me we would find it here," explained Dee. "He said it was erected in seventeen-sixty-nine by the citizens of Charleston in honor of his promoting the repeal of the Stamp Act. His arm got knocked off by a cannon ball in the siege of Charleston."

"This over here is Valentine's bust of Henry Timrod," called Dum from a very interesting-looking bronze statue that had attracted her artistic eye all the time the little nigs were singing.

"Timrod! Oh, Edwin, he is the one I am most interested in in all South Carolina," and Mrs. Green joined Dum to view the bust from all angles. Of course, all of us followed.

"'Through clouds and through sunshine, in peace and in war, amid the stress of poverty and the storm of civil strife, his soul never faltered,'" read Mrs. Green from the inscription on the monument of one of the truest poets of the South. "'To his poetic mission he was faithful to the end. In life and in death he was "Not disobedient unto the heavenly vision."'"

I whipped out my little notebook and began feverishly to copy the tribute. I found Mrs. Green doing the same thing in a similar little book.

"'Not disobedient to the heavenly vision'! I should like to have such a thing on my monument. I used to think that just so I could make a lot of money I wouldn't mind what kind of stuff I wrote; but now I do want to live up to an ideal," she exclaimed to me. "Do you feel that way?"

"I don't know whether I do or not. I don't believe I could stand the stress of having my manuscript rejected time after time and the storm of returning it again and again. I am afraid I'd be willing to have written the Elsie books just to have made as much money as they say the author of them has made. I know that sounds pretty bad, but – "

"I understand, my dear. I fancy my feeling as I do is something that has come to me just because the making of money is not of as much importance to me as it used to be. There was a time in my girlhood when I would have written Elsie books or even worse with joy just to make the money."

"I can't quite believe it. You look so spirituelle, and I believe you have always been obedient to the heavenly vision."

"Look on this side," said my new friend, laughing and blushing in such a girlish way that it seemed ridiculous to talk of her girlhood as though it had passed. "This inscription is more utilitarian:

"'This memorial has been erected with the proceeds of the recent sale of a very large edition of the author's poems, by the Timrod Memorial Association, of South Carolina.'

"and then:

 
"'Genius, like Egypt's Monarch, timely wise,
Erects its own memorial ere it dies.'
 

"Oh, Edwin, look! Here is the ode that mother sings to little Mildred, here on the back of the monument. Mildred is my baby, you know," she said, in explanation to us, "and mother sings the most charming things to her."

"Please read it to us, Molly; I didn't bring my glasses."

That is what Professor Green said, but when we had known him longer we found out he was not so very dependent on glasses that he could not read an inscription carved in one-inch letters, but that he always made his wife read aloud when he could. When she read poetry, it was music, indeed. It seems he first realized what he felt for her when she read the "Blessed Damosel" in his class at college. He had been her instructor, as he had Miss Ball's.

"This ode of Timrod's was sung for the first time on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead at Magnolia Cemetery, here in Charleston, in sixty-seven, so I am told."

No wonder Professor Edwin wanted his Molly to read the poem! Her voice was the most wonderfully sympathetic and singularly fitted to the reading of poetry that I have ever heard. I longed for my father to hear her read. He could make me weep over poetry when I would go dry-eyed through all kinds of trouble, and now Mrs. Green had the same power:

 
"'Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.
 
 
"'In seeds of laurel in the earth
The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone!
 
 
"'Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years
Which keep in trust your storied tombs,
Behold! your sisters bring their tears,
And these memorial blooms.
 
 
"'Small tributes! but your shades will smile
More proudly on these wreaths today,
Than when some cannon-moulded pile
Shall overlook this bay.
 
 
"'Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,
By mourning beauty crowned!'"
 

We were all very quiet for a moment and then St. Michael's bells rang out six-thirty o'clock, and in spite of poetical emotions we knew the pangs of hunger were due and it was time for dinner.

We were to sit together at a larger table that evening at dinner, to the satisfaction of all of us.

"It is a mutual mash," declared Dee, when we went to our room to don dinner clothes. "The Greens seem to like us, and don't we just adore the Greens, though!"

"I believe I like him as much as I do her," said Dum. "Of course, he is not so paintable. She makes me uncertain whether I want to be a sculptor or a painter. I have been thinking how she would look in marble, and while she has good bones, all right, and would show up fine in marble, she would certainly lose out if she had to be pure white and could not have that lovely flush and those blue, blue eyes and that red-gold hair."

"I don't see why you talk about Mrs. Green's bones!" exclaimed Dee, rather indignantly. "I can't see that her bones are the least bit prominent."

"Well, goose, I mean her proportions. Beauty, to my mind, does not amount to a row of pins if it is only skin deep; it's got to go clean through to the bones."

"Well, I don't believe it. I bet you Mrs. Green's skeleton would look just like yours or mine or Miss Plympton's or anybody else's."

"You flatter yourself."

"Well, girls," I cried, feeling that pacific intervention was in order, "there's no way to prove or disprove except by X-ray photography so long as we have Mrs. Green on this mundane sphere. I certainly would not have a row over it. Mrs. Green's bones are very pleasingly covered, to my way of thinking."

"They are beautiful bones, or their being well covered would not make any difference. Just see here" – and Dum began rapidly sketching a skull and then piling up hair on it and putting in a nose and lips, etc. – "can't you see if the skull is out of proportion with a jimber jaw and a bulging forehead that all the pretty skin on earth with hair like gold in the sunset would not make it beautiful?"

"Well, I know one thing," put in Dee: "I know you could take a hunk of clay and start to make a mouse and then change your mind and keep on piling clay on, and shaping it, and patting it, and moulding it until you had turned it into a cat. If you can do that much, I should like to know why the Almighty couldn't do the same thing. Couldn't He start with chunky bones, and then fill them out and mould the flesh, pinching in here and plumping out there until He had made a tall and slender person?"