And believe me, friend John, that he is good to come, and kind.

Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways.

Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break.

But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be." I did not like to wound him by pretending not to see his idea, but as I did not yet understand the cause of his laughter, I asked him.

As he answered me his face grew stern, and he said in quite a different tone, "Oh, it was the grim irony of it all, this so lovely lady garlanded with flowers, that looked so fair as life, till one by one we wondered if she were truly dead, she laid in that so fine marble house in that lonely churchyard, where rest so many of her kin, laid there with the mother who loved her, and whom she loved, and that sacred bell going 'Toll! Toll! Toll!' so sad and slow, and those holy men, with the white garments of the angel, pretending to read books, and yet all the time their eyes never on the page, and all of us with the bowed head.
And all for what?
She is dead, so! Is it not ?" "Well, for the life of me, Professor," I said, "I can't see anything to laugh at in all that.