Gale Zona
Peace in Friendship Village
PEACE IN FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE 2
Post-office Hall, where the Peace celebration was to be held, was filled with flags, both bought and borrowed, and some made up by us ladies, part guessed at but most of them real accurate out of the back of the dictionary.
Two days before the celebration us ladies were all down working in the hall, and all pretty tired, so that we were liable to take exception, and object, and I don't know but what you might say contradict.
"My feet," says Mis' Toplady, "ache like the headache, and my head aches as if I'd stood on it."
"Do they?" says Mis' Postmaster Sykes, with her little society pucker. "Why, I feel just as fresh. I've got a wonderful constitution."
"Oh, anybody's constitution feels fresh if they don't work it too hard," says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, having been down to the Hall all day long, as Mis' Sykes hadn't.
Then Mis' Toplady, that is always the one to pour oil and balm and myrrh and milk onto any troubled situation, she brought out her question more to reduce down the minute than anything else:
"Ladies," she says, holding up one foot to rest the aching sole of it, "Ladies, what under the sun are we going to do now that our war work's done?"
"What indeed?" says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss.
"What indeed?" says I.
"True for you," says Mis' Sykes, that always has to sound different, even though she means the same.
Of course we were all going to do what we could to help all Europe, but saving food is a kind of negative activity, and besides us ladies had always done it. Whereabouts was the novelty of that?
And we'd took over an orphan each and were going to skin it out of the egg-money and such – that is, not the orphan but its keep – and still these actions weren't quite what we meant, either.
"The mornings," says Mis' Toplady dreamy, "when I use' to wake up crazy to get through with my work and get with you ladies to sew – where's all that gone?"
"The meetings," says Mame Holcomb, "when Baptists and Catholics and young folks and Elks met promiscuous and sung and heard talking – where's them?"
And somebody brought out the thing we'd all thought most about.
"The days," she says, "when we worked next to our old enemies – both church and family enemies – and all bad feelings forgot – where's them times?"
"What we going to do about it?" I says. "And when?"
Mis' Sykes had a suggestion. She always does have a suggestion, being she loves to have folks disciple after her. "Why, ladies," she says, "there's some talking more military preparedness right off, I hear. That means for another war. Why not us start in and knit for it now?" And she beamed around triumphant.
"Well," says Mame Holcomb, reasonable, "if the men are going to prepare in any way, it does seem like women had ought to be getting ready too. Why not knit? And have a big box all setting ready, all knit up, to match the other preparednesses?"
It was on to this peaceful assemblage that Berta, Mis' Sykes's little Switzerland maid, came rushing. And her face was pale and white. "Oh, Mis' Sykes," she says, "oh, what jew s'pose? I found a little boy setting on the front stoop."
Mis' Sykes is always calm – not so much because calm is Christian as because calm is grand lady, I always think. "On whose stoop, Berta?" she ask' her kind.
"On your own stoop, ma'am," cried Berta excitable.
"And whose little boy is it, Berta?" she ask', still more calm and kind.
"That's what I donno, ma'am," says Berta. "Nor they don't no one seem to know."
We all ask' her then, so that I don't know, I'm sure, how she managed to say a word on her own hook. It seems that she'd come around the house and see him setting there, still as a mouse. When he see her, he looked up and smiled, and got up like he'd been waiting for somebody. Berta had taken him in the kitchen.
"And he's wearing all different clothes than I ever see before in my life," said Berta, "and he don't know who he is, nor nothing. Nor he don't talk right."
Mis' Sykes got up in her grand, deliberate way. "Undoubtedly it's wandered away from its ma," says she, and goes out with the girl that was still talking excitable without getting a great deal said.
The rest of us finished setting the hall in shape. It looked real nice, with the Friendship Village booth on one side and the Foreign booth on the other. Of course the Friendship Village booth was considerably the biggest, being that was the one we knew the most about.
Then us ladies started home, and we were rounding the corner by Mis' Sykes's, when we met her a-running out.
"Ladies," she says, "if this is anybody's child that lives in Friendship Village, I wish you'd tell me whose. Come along in."
She was awful excited, and I don't blame her. Sitting on the foot of the lounge in her dining-room was the funniest little dud ever I see. He was about four years old, and he had on a little dress that was all gold braid, and animals, and pictures, and biscuits, and shells, looked like. But his face was like any – black eyes he had, and a nice skin, and plain, brown hair, and no hat.
"For the land," we all says, "where did he come from?"
"Now listen at this," says Mis' Sykes, and she squatted down in front of him that was eating his cracker so pretty, and she says, "What's your name?"
It stumped him. He only stared.
Mis' Sykes rolled her eyes, and she pressed him. "Where d'you live?"
That stumped him too. He only stared on.
"What's your papa's name?"
That was a worse poser. So was everything else we asked him. Pretty soon he begun to cry, and that was a language we could all understand. But when we ask' him, frantic, what it was he wanted, he said words that sounded like soup with the alphabet stirred in.
"Heavens!" says Mis' Sykes. "He ain't English."
And that's what we all concluded. He wore what we'd never seen, he spoke what we couldn't speak, he come from nobody knew where.
But while we were a-staring at each other, the Switzerland maid come a-racing back. Seems she'd been up to the depot, a block away, and Copper, the baggageman, had noticed a queer-looking kid on the platform when some folks got off Number 16 that had gone through west an hour or so back. Copper thought the kid was with them, but he didn't notice it special. Where the folks went to, nobody knew.
"Down on the Flats somewhere, that's where its folks went," says Mis' Sykes. "Sure to. Well, then, they'll be looking for it. We must get it in the papers."
We raced around and advertised that little boy in the Daily. The Friendship Village Evening Daily goes to press almost any time, so if you happen to hit it right, you can get things in most up to seven o'clock. Quite often the Evening Daily comes after we're all in bed, and we get up and read it to go to sleep by. We told the sheriff, and he come up that evening and clucked at the little boy, without getting a word out of him, no more than we could. The news flew round town, and lots of folks come up to see him. It was more exciting than a night-blooming cereus night.
But not a soul come to claim him. He might have dropped down from inside the air.
"Well," says Mis' Sykes, "if some of them foreigners down on the Flats has lost him, it'll be us that'll have to find him. They ain't capable of nothing."
That was how Mis' Sykes, and Mis' Toplady, and Mame Holcomb and I hitched up and went down to the Flats and took the baby with us, right after breakfast next morning, to try our best to locate him.
The Flats are where the Friendship Village ex-foreigners live – ain't it scandalous the way we keep on calling ex-foreigners foreigners? And then, of course, nobody's so very foreign after you get acquainted. Americans, even, ain't so very foreign to Europeans after they get to know us, they say. I'd been down there often enough to see my wash-woman, or dicker for a load of wood, or buy new garden truck, or get somebody to houseclean, but I didn't know anybody down there to visit – and none of us ladies did. The Flats were like that. The Flats didn't seem ever to count real regular in real Friendship Village doings. For instance, the town was just getting in sewerage, but it wasn't to go in down on the Flats, and nobody seemed surprised. The only share the Flats seemed to have in sewerage was to house the long, red line of bunk cars, where the men lived, drawn up on a spur of track by the gas house.
It was a heavenly day, warm and cool and bright, with a little whiff of wind, like a sachet bag, thrown in. We had the Sykeses' surrey and old white horse, and Mis' Toplady and Mame and me squoze on the back seat so's to let Mis' Sykes, that was driving, have sitting beside her in plain sight that little boy in his blazing red dress.
We went first to see some folks named Amachi – her husband was up in the pineries, she said, and so she run their little home-made rug business. She was a wonderful, motherly soul, and she poored the little boy with her big, thick hand and listened, with her face up and her hair low in her neck like some kind of a picture with big, sad eyes. But she hadn't heard of anybody lost.
"One trouble with these folks," Mis' Sykes says as we drove away, "they never know anything but their own affairs."
Then we went to some folks named Cardell. They tended the bridge and let the gypsies camp in their pasture whenever they wanted. She was cutting the grass with a blunt pair of shears; and she had lots of flowers and vines and the nicest way of talking off the tip of her tongue. She give the little boy a cup of warm milk, but she hadn't heard anything about anybody being lost anywheres.
"Real superior for a foreigner," says Mis' Sykes, so quick after she'd clucked to her horse I was afraid Mis' Cardell heard her.
Then we saw an old lady named Marchant, that her ancestors had settled up Friendship Village, but she was so poor now that everybody had kind of forgot about that, and some folks named Swenson that lived in the toll-gate house and had a regular hennery of homeless cats. And though they give the little boy a flower or two and left him stroke a kitty or more, they hadn't any of them either seen or heard of anybody that was out trying to locate a son.
It was just a little while after we started that Mis' Sykes had her great idea. I remember we were just coming out at Mis' Swenson's when she thought of it, and all the homeless cats were following along behind us with all their tails sticking up straight.
"Ladies," says Mis' Sykes, "why in under the canopy don't we get some work out of some of these folks for the peace meeting to-morrow night?"
"I was thinking of that," says Mame Holcomb.
"Some of them would wash the dishes and not charge anything, being it's for the peace."
"And help clean up next day," says Mis' Sykes. "That's when the backaching, feet-burning work comes in."
"Costs a sight to pay by the hour," says Mame, "and this way we could get the whole thing free, for patriotism."
"Mop the hall floor, too," says Mis' Sykes. "Land," she adds, only about half soft enough, "look at them children! Did you ever see such skinny sights?"
Awful pindling-looking children, the Swensons were, and there were most as many of them as there were cats.
When she got to the gate, Mis' Sykes turned round in her grand-lady way, and she says, "Mis' Swenson, why don't you and your husband come up to the peace meetin' to-morrow night and help us?"
Mis' Swenson was a peaked little thing, with too much throat in length and not enough in thickness. "I never heard of it," she says.
Mis' Sykes explained in her commanding way. "Peace, you know," she says, "is to be celebrated between the different countries. And, of course, this is your country, too," Mis' Sykes assured her, "and we'd like to hev you come up and help with the dishes, or like that."
"Is it dress-up?" says Mis' Swenson, not very loud.
"My, no!" we told her, and decided to stick to the usual hooks in our closets.
"I'd like to," says Mis' Swenson, "if I can get Pete to change his clothes."
"So do," says Mis' Sykes gracious and clucked her horse along. "My goodness," she says, "what awful stuff these folks must feed their children! And how they must bungle 'em when they're sick. And they won't hardly any of 'em come to-morrow night," she says. "You can not," she says, "get these folks to take part in nothing."
We went to twenty or thirty houses, and every one of them Mis' Sykes invited to come and help. But not one of the twenty or thirty houses had heard of any foreigner whatever having just arrived in Friendship Village, nor had ever seen or heard of that little boy before. He was awful good, the little soul, waving his hands so nice that I begun to be afraid everybody we met would claim foreign and ask for him.
By noon we begun to get pretty excited. And the sheriff, he was excited too, and he was hunting just as wild as any of us, being arrests was light. He was hanging on the canal bridge when we crossed it, going home along toward noon.
"They never had a case of lost child in Friendship Village in twenty years," he said. "I looked it up."
"Lost child nothing!" I told him. "The child ain't lost. Here he is. It's the parents," I said, "that's lost on us."
The noon whistle blew just then, and the men that were working on the sewer threw down their shovels.
"Look at their faces," says Mis' Sykes. "Did you ever see anything so terrible foreign?"
"Foreign ain't poison," says Mis' Toplady on the back seat.
"I'm going to have Silas put a button on the cellar window," says Mis' Sykes.
"Shucks, they ain't shaved, that's all," says Mis' Toplady.
Mis' Sykes leaned over to the sheriff. "You better be up around the peace celebration to-morrow night," she says. "We've been giving out invitations pretty miscellaneous, and we might need you."
"I'll drop up," says the sheriff. "But I like to watch them bunk cars pretty close, where the men live."
"Is there much lawlessness?" Mis' Sykes asks, fearful.
Mis' Toplady sings out, laughing, that there would be if she didn't get home to get Timothy's dinner, and Mis' Sykes come to herself and groaned.
"But oh, my land," she says, "we ain't found no ma nor pa for this child. What in time are we going to do? I'm too stiff," she says, "to adopt one personally."
But the little boy, he just smelled of the flowers the folks on the Flats had give him, and waved his hand to the sheriff, cute.
Late the next afternoon, us ladies that weren't tending to the supper were trying to get the Foreign booth to look like something. The Foreign booth looked kind of slimpsey. We hadn't got enough in it. We just had a few dishes that come from the old country, and a Swiss dress of Berta's mother's and a Japanese dress, and like that. But we couldn't seem to connect up much of Europe with Friendship Village.
At five o'clock the door opened, and in walked Mis' Amachi and Mis' Swenson from the Flats, with nice black dresses on and big aprons pinned up in newspapers. Pretty soon in come old Mis' Marchant, that had rode up on a grocery delivery wagon, she said. Close behind these come some more of them we had asked. And Mis' Sykes, acting like the personal hostess to everything, took them around and showed them things, the Friendship Village booth that was loaded with stuff, and the Foreign booth that wasn't.
And Mis' Poulaki, one of the Greek women, she looked for a while and then she says, "We got two nice musics from old country."
She made her hands go like playing strings, and we made out that she meant two musical instruments.
"Good land!" says Mis' Sykes. "Post right straight home and get them. Got anything else?"
"A little boy's suit from Norway," says Mis' Swenson. "And my marriage dress."
"Get it up here!" cries Mis' Sykes. "Ladies, why do you s'pose we never thought of this before?"
There wasn't hardly one of them that couldn't think of something – a dish, or a candlestick, or wooden shoes, or an old box, or a kerchief. Old Mis' Marchant had come wearing a shoulder shawl that come from Lombardy years back, and we jerked it off her and hung it up, hole and all.
It made quite some fun for all of us. And all the time our little strange boy was running around the floor, playing with papers, and when we weren't talking of anything else, we were talking about him.
"Say," says Mis' Sykes, that never means to say "say" but gets it said unbeknownst when excited, "I guess he's the foreignest thing we've got."
But by six o'clock she was ready to take that back, about him being the foreignest. The women from the Flats had all come back, bringing all they had, and by the time we put it up the Foreign booth looked like Europe personified. And that wasn't all. Full three quarters of the folks that we'd asked from down there had showed up, and most of them says they'd got their husbands to come too. So we held off the supper a little bit for them – a fifteen-cent supper it was, coffee and sandwiches and baked beans and doughnuts – and it was funny, when you think of it, for us to be waiting for them, for most of us had never spoken to any of these folks before. The women weren't planning to eat, they said; they'd help, but their men would buy the fifteen-cent supper, they added, proud. Isn't it kind of sad and dear and motherly, the way, whenever there isn't food enough, it's always the woman who manages to go without and not let on, just exactly like her husband was her little boy?
By and by in they all come, dressed up clean but awful heavy-handed and big-footed and kind of wishing they hadn't come. But I liked to see them with our little lost red boy. They all picked him up and played with him like here was something they knew how to do.
The supper was to come first, and the peace part afterward, in some set speeches by the town orators; and we were just ready to pour out the coffee, I recollect, when the fire-bell rang. Us ladies didn't think much of that. Compared with getting supper onto the table, what was a fire? But the men all jumped up excitable, being fires are more in their line.
Then there was a scramble and rush and push outside, and the door of the hall was shoved open, and there stood a man I'd never seen before, white and shaking and shouting.
"The bunk cars!" he cried. "They're burning. Come!"
The bunk cars – the ten or twelve cars drawn up on a spur track below the gas house…
All of us ran out of the hall. It didn't occur to us till afterward that of course the man at the door was calling the men from the Flats, some of whom worked on the sewer too. I don't suppose it would ever have entered his head to come up to call us if the Flat folks hadn't been there. And it was they who rushed to the door first, and then the rest of us followed.
It was still dusk, with a smell of the ground in the air. And a little new moon was dropping down to bed. It didn't seem as if there ought to be a fire on such a night. Everything seemed too usual and casual.
But there was. When we got in sight of the gas house, we could see the red glare on the round wall. When we got nearer, we could see the raggedy flames eating up into the black air.
The men that lived in the cars were trying to scrabble out their poor belongings. They were shouting queer, throaty cries that we didn't understand, but some of the folks from the Flats were answering them. I think that it seemed queer to some of us that those men of the bunk cars should be having a fire right there in our town.
"Don't let's get too near," says somebody. "They might have small-pox or something."
It was Mis' Sykes, with Silas, her husband, and him carrying that bright red little boy. And the baby, kind of scared at all the noise and the difference, was beginning to straighten out and cry words in that heathen tongue of his.
"Mercy," says Mis' Sykes, "I can't find Berta. He's going," she says, "to yell."
Just then I saw something that excited me more than the baby. There was one car near the middle that was burning hard when the stream of water struck it. And I saw that car had a little rag of lace curtain at its window, and a tin can with a flower in it. And when the blaze died for a minute, and the roof showed all burned, but not the lower part of the car or the steps, I saw somebody in blue overalls jump up the steps, and then an arm tearing down that rag of lace curtain and catching up the tin can.
"Well," I says pitiful, "ain't that funny? Some man down there in a bunk car, with a lace curtain and a posy."
I started down that way, and Mis' Toplady, Mis' Holcomb and the Sykeses come too, the Sykeses more to see if walking wouldn't keep the baby still. It wouldn't. That baby yelled louder than I'd ever heard one, which is saying lots but not too much.
When we all got down nearer, we came on Mis' Swenson and Mis' Amachi, counting up.
"We can take in two," says Mis' Swenson, "by four of the children sleeping on the floor that'll never wake up to know it."
"One can sleep on our lounge," says Mis' Amachi.
"We can put a couple or two in our barn," says a Flats man. "Oh, we'll find 'em room – no trouble to that."
Mis' Toplady and me looked at each other. Always before, in a Friendship Village catastrophe, her and me had been among the planners. But here we were, it seemed, left out, and the whole thing being seen to by the Flats.
"Say," says Mis' Toplady all of a sudden, "it's a woman!"
We were down in front by now, and I saw her too. The blue overalls, as I had called them, were a blue dress. And the woman, a little dark thing with earrings, stood there with her poor, torn lace curtain and her tin can with a geranium all wilted down.
"Mercy!" says Mis' Sykes, shuddering. "A woman down here!"
But I was looking at that woman. And I saw she wasn't listening to what some of the Flat women were saying to her. She had her head up and back as if she was listening to something else. And now she began moving through the crowd, and now she began running, straight to where all of us stood and Mis' Sykes was trying to hush the crying child.
The next second Mis' Sykes was near knocked down by the wildness and the strength of that little dark thing who threw herself on her and grabbed the baby.
Speaking Greek, speaking Hebrew, and Hittite, and Amalekite, and the tongues of Babylon at the confusion and the last day – for all we knew, these were what that woman was speaking. We couldn't make more head nor tail out of what she was saying than we had of the baby. But we could understand without understanding. It was in her throat, it was in her tears, it was in her heart. She cried, she sunk down to the ground, kissing that baby. He put out his hands and went right to her, laughing in the midst of the crying – oh, I've heard a baby laugh in its tears when it saw its mother, but this one was the best. And he snuggled up close, while she poured all over him them barbarous accents. But he knew what she said, and he said them back. Like before our eyes the alphabet of vermicelli had begun spelling words.
Then a man come running – I can see now that open collar, that face covered with stubble, those great eyes under their mass of tangled hair, the huge, rough hands that he laid about the baby's shoulders. And they both began talking to us, first one and then both, asking, looking, waiting for us to reply. Nobody replied. We all looked to Mis' Sykes to see what she could think of, as we always do in a village emergency.
But it wasn't Mis' Sykes that could help us now. It was the Flat folks. It was them that could understand. Half a dozen of them began telling us what it was they said. It seemed so wonderful to see the folks that we had never paid attention to, or thought they knew anything, take those tangled sounds and unravel them for us, easy, into regular, right-down words.
It seems the family had got to Friendship Village night before last, him to work on the sewer and his wife to cook for the men in the bunk cars. There were five other little folks with them – sure enough, there they were now, all flocking about her – and the oldest girl had somehow lost the baby. Poor souls, they had tried to ask. But he knew that he must dig and she must cook, and there was not much time for asking, and eight weeks in this country was all that they had and hardly three words of English. As for asking the law, they knew the law only as something that arrests you.
We were all there in a bunch by that time, everybody making signs to everybody, whether anybody could understand or not. There was something about those two, with our little chap in the midst of them, that sort of loosened us all up. We all of us understood so thorough that we pretty near forgot the fire.
By then it had most died down anyhow, and somebody started to move back up-town.
"The hall, the hall!" says Mis' Toplady to us. "Have 'em all go up to the Post-office Hall. Spread it, spread it!"
We did spread it, to go up there and see what we could do for the burned-out folks, and incidentally finish the peace celebration.
Up there in Post-office Hall the lights were all on, just as we'd left them, and there was kind of a cozy feel of supper in the air.
"Look here," says Mis' Toplady, "there's quarts of coffee hot on the back of the stove and a whole mountain of sandwiches – "
"Let's," I says. And we all begun to do so.
We all begun to do so, and I begun to do something more. I'd learned quite a little from seeing them there in the hall and kitchen that afternoon, the Swensons and Poulakis and Amachis and the rest. And now here were these others, from the bunk cars, – big, beautiful eyes they had, and patient looks, and little bobbing curtsies, and white teeth when they smiled. I saw them now, trying to eat and behave the best they knew how, and back of them the Foreign booth, under the Foreign flag. And what I begun to have to do, was to get in over behind that Foreign Booth and wipe up my eyes a little.
Once I peeked out. And I happened to see the sheriff going by. He was needed, like Mis' Sykes told him he might be, but not the same, either. He was passing the sugar and cream.
What brought me out finally was what I heard Mis' Sykes saying:
"Ladies," says she, "let's us set her up there in the middle of the Foreign Booth, with her little boy in her lap. That'll be just the finishing foreign touch," says she, "to our booth."
So we covered a chair with foreign flags, promiscuous, and set her there. Awful pretty and serious she looked.
"If only we could talk to her," says Mis' Sykes, grieving. "Ladies, any of you know any foreign sentences?"
All any of us could get together was terra cotton and delirium tremens. So we left it go, and just stood and looked at her, and smiled at her, and clucked at the little boy, and at all her little folks that come around her in the booth, under the different flags.
"We'll call her Democracy!" says Marne Holcomb, that often blazes up before the match is lit. "Why not call her the Spirit of Democracy, in the newspaper write-up?"
With that Mis' Sykes kind of stopped winking and breathing, in a way she has.
"My land," she says, "but s'pose he's an enemy baby and she's his enemy ma?"
There hadn't one of us thought of that. For all we had made out, they might be anything. We got hold of Mis' Poulaki and Mis' Amachi, hot foot.
"Ast her what she is," we told them. "Ast her what country it is she comes from."
"Oh," says Mis' Poulaki, "that we know already. They're Lithuanians – that is what they are."
Lithuanians. Where was it? Us ladies drew together still more close. Was Lithuanians central power or was it ally? Us ladies ain't so very geographical, and not one of us knew or could make out.
"Say," says Mis' Toplady finally, "shut up, all of us. If it gets around for folks to wonder at – Why, my land," she says, "their bunk car's burned up anyhow, ain't it? Let's us shut up."
And so we done. And everybody was up around the Foreign Booth. And the Friendship Village booth was most forgot.
All of a sudden, somebody started up "America." I don't know where they'd learned it. There aren't so very many chances for such as these to learn it very good. Some of them couldn't say a word of it, but they could all keep in tune. I saw the side faces of the Flats folks and the bunk car folks, while they hummed away, broken, at that tune that they knew about. Oh, if you want to know what to do next with your life, go somewhere and look at a foreigner in this country singing "America," when he doesn't know you're looking. I don't see how we rest till we get our land a little more like what he thinks it is. And while I was listening, it seemed as if Europe was there in the room.
It was while they were singing that the magic began to work in us all. I remember how it started.
"Oh," says Mis' Toplady, "ladies! Think of that little boy, and the other folks, living in those bunk cars. Don't it seem as if, while they're here, us ladies could – "
"Don't it?" I says.
"And the little skinny ones down on the Flats," Mis' Toplady whispers pretty soon. "Can't some of us teach them women how to feed them better and cost no more?"
"And take care of them when they're sick," says Mame Holcomb. "I shouldn't wonder if they die when they don't need to, all day long."
We see ideas gathering back of one another's eyes. And all of a sudden I thought of something else. "Ladies," I says, "and get sewerage down there on the Flats! Don't it belong there just exactly as much as in the residence part?"
Us ladies all looked at each other. We'd just taken it for granted the Flats shouldn't have sewerage and should have the skeptic tank.
"Say," says Mis' Toplady, "it don't look to me like we'd have a very hard time knowing what to do with ourselves, now this war is over."
"The mornings," says Mame Holcomb, "when we use' to wake up, crazy to start in on something – it looks to me like they ain't all through with yet!"
"The meetings," says Mis' Toplady, "when Baptists and Catholics and Elks – "
Mis' Sykes was listening. It ain't very often that she comes down off her high horse, but when she does, I tell you she lands hard.
