Melancholy

That night, I gave the preacher his Littmus Lozenge right before he kissed me good night.

"What's this?" he said.

"It's some candy that Miss. Franny's great-grand-father invented. It's called Littmus Lozenge."

The preacher unwrapped it and put it in his mouth, and after a minute, he started rubbing his nose and nodding his head.

"Do you like it?" I asked him.

"It has a peculiar flavor....."

"Root beer?" I said.

"Something else."

"Strawberry?"

"That, too. But there's still something else. It's odd."

I could see the preacher getting further and further away. He was hunching up his shoulders and lowering his chin and getting ready to pull his head inside his shell.

"It almost tastes a little melancholy," he said.

"Melancholy?? What's that??"

"Sad," said the preacher. He rubbed his nose some more.

" It makes me think of your mother."

Winn Dixie, was a curious dog, and sniffed at the candy wrapper in the preacher's hand.

"It tastes sad," he said, and sighed. "It must be a bad batch."

"No," I told him. I sat up in bed. "That's the way it's suppose to taste. Littmus came back from the war and his whole family was dead. His daddy died fighting. And his mama and his sisters died from a disease and the Yankees burned his house down. And Littmus was sad, and what he wanted more than anything in the world was something sweet. So he built a candy factory and made Littmus Lozenges, and he put all the sad he was feeling into the candy.

A passage from the book "Because of Winn-Dixie" Author Kate DiCamillo