death for weeks. In fact Mrs. MacPherson had paid a sick call on Stasha about a week before and now Mrs. MacPherson was dead and Stasha was still hanging on. Well, in the midst of their tea, the women asked about the white gloves. The men looked from one to the other. No white gloves. The women began to get agitated. How could they ship Mrs. MacPherson off barehanded. lmaginel, a wake without gloves for the corpse. The men got a bit resentful. They felt they had done pretty well. They’d gone to Georgetown and back. They had the coffin, the important article, they had the arm bands and some Demerara to soothe the afflicted. Still the women weren’t happy. They kept nattering about the white gloves. Finally, John James MacCormack choked down his biscuit and jumped to his feet.

‘We’ll got the white glovesl, he roared, ‘next time we’re in Georgetown, and we’ll, we’ll,’ he busted out, ‘we’ll send them with Stasha!’

After he stopped laughing your grandfather said, ’No more stories about corpses as long as we’re on this island.’ I told him to get out with the flashlight and the axe and break up some more boards. ‘lt’s your idea we’re here,’ I told him, ‘and we need some more fire or we’ll all be corpses. And I have another story about a corpse but I’ll save it for tomorrow night.’

Paine says, ‘you’ll be telling stories over my corpse, for sure, if we’re still here tomorrow night.’

Your grandfather comes stumbling in with an arm load of boards, him half-frozen. ‘Another drink, another drink’, he says, ’and let’s hear that other story. Maybe Johnny Walker could hear it too, if we took the cork out of the bottle.’

‘O.K’, says I, ’and maybe this is about one of his in—laws, because the corpse in this story was Mrs. Walker.’

80 we had another pull at the bottle.

When old Mrs. Walker died they had a coffin ready, unlike the lady in the first story, but they had no rough box to carry it in. They had to take her over to the mainland by boat and what with the sand and the salt spray, to say nothing of the seagulls, they had to have some protection for the coffin. What to do?. They started scratching around to come up with some decent boards to make

a box. Someone remembered that Mrs. Walker had a clean grain 45