Gale Zona
Peace in Friendship Village
We were all to meet at the courthouse with our lunches and go right out to the Pump pasture. The tents were up already, flags were flying every which way, and folks were running all over, busy.
"Like somebody was giving a party," I says.
Lucy never said a word. She'd gone along, kind of breathless, all the way down. All us that know each other best were there. And we were dying to get into each other's lunches and see what each other had brought. So Jimmy Sturgis went to building fire for the coffee, and Eppleby went off for water, and Silas Sykes, that don't like to do much work, he says:
"Timothy, supposing we go along down and buy all our tickets and avoid the rush?"
We let them go, and occupied ourselves spreading down the cloth, and cutting up cake and veal loaf, and opening up pickles and jell. The maple shade came down nice on the cloth, and appetizing little picnic smells of potato salad and other things begun getting out around, and the whole time was cozy and close up to. We were just disposing the deviled eggs in a mound in the middle, when Silas Sykes and Timothy come fair running up the slope.
"My dum!" says Silas. "They won't leave us buy no tickets. They say the show is free."
"Free!" says most everybody but me in chorus.
"They say they ain't no ticket wagon, and they ain't going to be," says Silas. "What you going to make out that?"
"Blisterin' Benson!" says Timothy Toplady. "What I think is this, they're kidding us."
Lucy stood opening up a little bag she had.
"Here's one of the slips they threw round this morning," she says; "I dunno – "
She had it out and we studied it. We'd all seen them blowing round the streets, but nobody had paid any attention. She held it out and they all stared at it:
FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
IS INVITED TO COME TO THE CIRCUS
THIS AFTERNOON
FREE
NO TICKETS ON SALE
FREE ADMISSION
FOR
FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
"My gracious," says Mis' Sykes, "I never heard of such a thing since the world began."
"Land, land!" says Mis' Toplady. "But what does it mean?"
"What does it mean?" says Silas Sykes. "What are we all being a party to?"
"I guess it's who are we being a party to, Silas," I says, mild.
They all looked at me. And then they looked where I was looking, and I was looking at something hard. Coming out of the main tent was a mass of struggling, wriggling, dancing humanity – little humanity – in short, the boys that had rode in the big wagon. And walking in the midst of them was a man.
At first not even I recognized him. He had his coat off, and his collar was turned in, his hat was on the back of his head, and he was smiling throughout his whole face, which was red.
"Look-at!" says I. "I guess that's who we're the party to – all of us."
"What do you mean?" Silas says again.
"I mean," says I, "that Nick Nordman's had this whole circus come here to the village and give it to us free. And I say, let's us rush down there and drag him up here to eat with us!"
It came to them so sudden that they all moved off like one man, and, as we started together, not caring who stole the whole lunch that we left laying idle under the tree, I turned and took a look at Lucy.
Land, she looked as I haven't seen her look in twenty years! Her head was back, her eyes were bright, her face was bright, and she didn't know one of us was there. She just went down the slope, running.
We came on him as he was distributing nickels destined for the peanut man that had just got his wagon going, savory. Nick didn't see us till we were right there, and then the nicest shamefaced look come over him, and he threw the rest of the nickels among the boys and left them scrambling, and met us.
"Nick Nordman! Is this your doings?" Silas plumped it at him, accusing.
"Gosh, no!" says Nick, grinning like a schoolboy. "It's the kids' doin's."
And when a millionaire can say "Gosh" like he said it, you can't feel remote from him. Nobody could. Oh, how we talked at him, all round, a good many at a time. And I think everything there was to say, we said it. Anyway, I can't think of any exclamation to speak of that we left unexclaimed.
We all streamed up the slope, Silas near walking backward most of the way to take in the full magnitude of it. We sat down round the potato salad and the deviled eggs and the veal loaf, beaming. And it made a real nice minute.
Oh, and it was no time till we got to living over the old days. And it was no time till Timothy and Eppleby were rolling over, recalling this and bringing back that. It was no time at all till every one of us was back twenty-five to thirty years, and telling about it. And Lucy, that I'd maneuvered should sit by Nick, I caught her looking across at me kind of superior, and as if she could have told me, all the while, that something or other was so!
"Let's us drink him a toast," says Timothy Toplady when we got through. "Look-at here: To Nicholas Nordman, the big man of Friendship Village."
"Yes, sir!" says Silas Sykes. "And to Nicholas Nordman, that's give us ten thousand dollars and a circus!"
"No, sir!" says Eppleby Holcomb, sudden. "None of them things. Let's us drink just to Nick Nordman, that's come back home!" He up with his hand, and it came down on Nick Nordman's shoulder with a sound you could have heard all acrost the grounds.
And as he did that, just for a fraction of nothing, Nick Nordman met my eyes. And we both knew what we both knew.
Just then the band struck up, and the people were already pouring in the pasture, so we scrabbled things up and all started for the tent. Nick was walking with Lucy.
"Lucy," I heard him say, "you look near enough like you used to, for you to be you!"
She looked like a girl as she answered him. "You are you, Nick," she says, simple and neat and direct.
And me – I walked along, feeling grand. I kind of felt what all of us was feeling, and what everybody was going to feel down there in the big tent, when they knew. But far, far more, I sensed the thing that Nick Nordman, walking there with us, with about a hundred and fifty boys all waiting to sit down side of him at his circus – the thing that Nick Nordman had found out.
"God bless you, Calliope," says he, when he got a chance.
"Oh!" I says. "He has. He has! He's made folks so awful nice – when they just let it show through!"
BEING GOOD TO LETTY 4
"The poor little thing," says I. "Well, mustn't we be good to her?"
"Mustn't we?" says Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, wiping her eyes.
"Must we not?" says Mis' Silas Sykes – that would correct your grammar if the house was on fire.
My niece's daughter Letty had lost her father and her mother within a year, and she was coming to spend the summer with me.
"She's going to pick out the style monument she wants here in town," I says, "and maybe buy it."
"Poor thing! That'll give her something to put her mind on," says Mis' Sykes.
George Fred come in just then to fill my wood-box – his father was bound he should be named George and his mother hung out for Fred, so he got both onto him permanent. He was going to business college, and choring it for near the whole town. He used to swallow his supper and rush like mad from wood-box to cow all over the village. Nights when I heard a noise, I never thought it was a burglar any more. I turned over again and thought: "That's George Fred cutting somebody's grass." I never see a man more bent on getting himself educated.
"George Fred," I says, "my grandniece Letty is coming to live with me. She's lost her folks. I thought we'd kind of try to be good to her."
"Trust me," says George Fred. "My cousin Jed, he lost his folks too. I can tell her about him."
The next day Letty came. I hadn't seen her for years. My land! when she got off the train, I never saw plainer. She was a nice little thing, but plain eyes, plain nose, plain mouth, and her hair – that was less than plain. But she was so smiling and so gentle that the plain part never bothered me a minute.
"Letty," says I, "welcome home." Mis' Merriman and Mis' Sykes had gone to the depot with me.
"Welcome home, child," says Mis' Merriman, and wiped her eyes! Mis' Merriman is human, but tactless.
"Welcome home, you poor thing," says Mis' Sykes, and she sniffed. Everything Mis' Sykes does she ought to have picked out to do the way she didn't.
But Letty, she took it serene enough. While we were getting her trunk, Mis' Sykes whispered to me:
"Are you sure she's the right niece? She ain't got on a stitch of mourning."
Sure enough, she hadn't. She wore a little blue dress.
"Like enough she couldn't afford it," says Mis' Merriman. And we thought that must be it.
They were both to stay for supper, and they'd each brought a little present for my niece. When she opened them, one was a black-edged handkerchief and the other was a package of mixed flower-seeds to plant next spring in her cemetery lot. Mis' Sykes and Mis' Merriman were both ready to cry all the while she untied them. But Letty smiled, serene, and thanked them, serene too, and put a pink aster from the table in her dress, and said, couldn't we go out and look at my flowers? And we went, Mis' Sykes and Mis' Merriman folding up their handkerchiefs and exchanging surprised eyebrows.
At the back door we came, plain in the face, on George Fred, whittling up my shavings.
"Two baskets of shavings, Miss Marsh, or one?"
"I guess," says I, "you'll earn your education better if you bring me in two."
George Fred never smiled. "I ain't earning my education any more, Miss Marsh," he says. "I've give it up. I can't make it go – not and chore it."
"Then you can't be a bookkeeper, George Fred?" I says.
"I've took a job delivering for the post-office store."
"Tell me about it, won't you?" says Letty.
George Fred told her a little about it, whittling my shavings.
"There ain't enough cows and grass and wood-boxes in the village to make it go, seems though," he ends up.
Then he rushed into the house with my stuff, and headed for the Sykes's cow that we could hear lowing.
We talked about George Fred while we looked at the flowers, Letty all interested in both of them, and then we came back and sat on the front porch.
"Dear child," says Mis' Sykes, "wouldn't it be a comfort to you, now that you're among friends, to talk about your folks? What was it they died of? Was they sick long?"
Letty looked over to her, sweet and serene.
"Beautiful things happened while they were sick," she said. "A little child across the street used to come every morning with a flower or a fresh egg. Then there was an old man who picked every rose in his garden and sent them in. And a club there hired a singer who was at the theater to come and serenade them, just a few days before. Oh, so many beautiful things happened!"
Mis' Sykes and Mis' Merriman sat still. This isn't the way we talk about sickness in the village. We always tell symptoms and treatments and pain and last words and funeral preparations, right up to the time the hearse backs up to the door.
"She acts the queerest, to me, for a mourner," says Mis' Sykes, when she went for her shawl.
Next morning we went down, Letty and me, to pick out the monument. Letty, she priced them, and then she figured some on a card. Then she walked over and priced some more things, and then she came out. I s'posed she was going to think about it.
"Didn't she cry when she picked out the monument?" says Mis' Sykes to me over the telephone that noon.
"I didn't see her," says I, truthful.
That night, after he got the last cow milked, I see George Fred, in his best clothes, coming in our front gate. He was coming, I see, to do what I said – help be good to Letty and cheer her up.
"Miss Letty," says he, "I know just how you feel. My cousin Jed, he lost his folks a year ago. They took down with the typhoid, and they suffered frightful – "
"I'm so sorry, Mr. Fred," says Letty.
I explained. "Fred," says I, "is his other front name. His final name is Backus."
She colored up pretty, and went right on – it was curious: she hadn't been with me twenty-four hours hardly, and yet she didn't look a bit plain to me now.
"Mr. Backus," Letty says, "I've been thinking. Miss Marsh and I have got a little money we're not using. Don't you want to borrow it, and keep on at business college, and pay us back when you can?"
"Gosh!" says George Fred.
If I hadn't been aiming to be a lady, I dunno what I might have said similar.
They talked about it, and then George Fred went off, walking some on the ground and some in the air. "Letty!" says I, then, "where in this world – "
"Why," says Letty, "I'm going to get just headstones instead of a monument – and leave that boy be a bookkeeper instead of a delivery boy. Father and mother – " it was the only time I heard her catch her breath sharp – "would both rather. I know it."
Before breakfast next morning, I ran over to Mis' Sykes's and Mis' Merriman's, and told them.
"Like enough she done something better than buy mourning, too," says Mis' Merriman.
It was the first and only time in my life I ever see Mis' Silas Sykes's eyes fill up with tears.
"Why, my land," she says, "she's using her sorrow."
And all of a sudden, the morning and the world meant something more. And Letty, that we were going to be so good to, had brought us something like a present.
SOMETHING PLUS 5
I laid the letter up on the clock-shelf where I could see it while I did my dishes. I needed it there to steady me. I didn't have to write my answer till after dinner, because it wouldn't go out until the four o'clock mail anyway. I kind of left the situation lie around me all the morning so I could sense it and taste it and, you might say, be steeped in it, and get so I could believe.
Me – a kind of guest housekeeper for six months in a beautiful flat in the city – with two young married folks and a little baby to amuse myself with, and the whole world sitting around me, expansive, and waiting for me to enjoy it. It seemed as if the Golden Plan folks always think is going to open up for them had really opened now for me.
How I kept from baking my doughnuts and frying my sponge-cakes in lard, I dunno, but I did – sheer through instinct, I guess. And then I wrote my letter and took it down to the post-office. Go? Wouldn't I go? My letter just said:
"Ellen dear, you ridiculous child, did you think I could wobble for a single second? I'd made up my mind before I got down the first page. I'll be there Monday night. Do you care if I wear your table-spread for dress-up, when I get there? All I've got is everyday – or not so much so. And for your wanting me, I'll say thank you when I get there.
Calliope."
On my way to mail my letter I came on Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, downtown to get something for supper. And I told them all about it.
Mis' Toplady hunched her shawl farther up her back and sighed abundant.
"Ain't that just grand, Calliope?" says she. "To think you're going to do something you ain't been doing all your days."
That was the point, and she knew it.
"I says to Timothy the other night," she went on, "I says, 'Don't you wish I had something to tell you about, or you had something to tell me about, that we both of us didn't know by heart, forward and back?'"
"Eppleby and me, too," says Mis' Holcomb, "I wish to the land we could do something – or be something – that would give a body something to kind of – relate to each other."
"I know," I says. "Husbands and wives is awful simultaneous, I always think."
But I didn't say anything more, being I wasn't married to one; and they didn't say anything more, being they was.
Mis' Holcomb waved her cheese at me, cheerful.
"Be gay for us!" says she, and then went home to cook supper for her hungry family.
And so did I, wishing with all my heart that the two of them – that hadn't seen over the rim of home in thirty years – could have had my chance.
When I got to the city that night it was raining – rather, it was past raining and on up to pouring. So I got in a taxi to go up to Ellen's – a taxi that was nothing but an automobile after all, in spite of its foreign name, ending in a letter that no civilized name ought to end in. And never, never, not if I live till after my dying day, will I forget my first look at that living-room of theirs – in the apartment building, as big as a ship, and as lighted up as our church at Christmas-time, which was where Ellen and Russell lived.
A pretty maid let me in. I remember I went in by her with my eyes on her white embroidery cap, perked up on her head and all ironed up, saucy as a blue jay's crest.
"Excuse me," I says to her over my shoulder, "I've read about them, but yours is the first one I ever saw. My dear, you look like a queen in a new starched crown."
She was an awful stiff little thing – 'most as stiff as her head-piece. She never smiled.
"What name?" she says, though – and I see she was friendlier than I'd thought.
"Why, mine's Calliope Marsh," I says, hearty. "What's yours?"
She looked so funny – I guess not many paid her much attention.
"Delia," she says. "You're expected," she says, and opened the inside door.
The room was long and soft and wine-colored, with a fire burning in the fireplace, and more lamps than was necessary, but that altogether didn't make much more light than one, only spread it out more. The piano was open, and there was a vase of roses – in Winter! They seemed to have them, I found out later, as casual as if there was a combined wedding and funeral in the house all the time. But they certainly made a beautiful picture.
But all this I sort of took in out of my eyes' four corners, while the rest of me looked at what was before the fire.
A big, low-backed chair was there, as fat and soft as a sofa. And in it was Ellen, in a white dress – in Winter! She wore them, I saw after a while, as casual as if she was at a party, perpetual. But there was something else there in a white dress, too, sitting on her lap, with his pink, bare feet stretched out to the blaze. And he was laughing, and Ellen was, too, at Russell, her husband, sitting on the floor, and aiming his head right at the baby's stomach, to hear him laugh out like – oh, like bluebells must be doing in the Spring.
"Pretty enough to paint," says I – which was the first they knew I was there.
It was a shame to spoil it, but Ellen and Russell sprang up, and tried to shake hands with me, though I wasn't taking the slightest notice of them. It was the baby I was engaged in. I'd never seen him before. In fact, I'd never seen Ellen and Russell since they were married two years before and went off to Europe, and lived on a peak of the Alps where the baby was born.
They took me to a gray little room that was to be mine, and I put on a fresh lace collar and my cameo pin and my best back comb. And then dinner was ready – a little, round white table with not one living thing on it but lace and roses and glass and silver.
"Why," says I, before I got through with my melon that came first, "why, you two must be perfectly happy, ain't you?"
And Ellen says, looking over to him:
"Perfectly, absolutely, radiantly happy. Yes, I am."
And this is what Russell done. He broke his bread, and nodded to both of us promiscuous, and he says:
"Considerable happier than any decent man has a right to be, I'm thinking."
I noticed that incident particular. And when I look back on it now, I know that that very first evening I begun noticing other things. I remember the talk went on about like this:
"Ellen," says Russell, "the dog show opened yesterday. They've got some great little pups, I hear. Aren't you going in?"
"Why – I am if you are," says Ellen.
"Nonsense," says Russell, "I can run in any time, but I can't very well meet you there in the middle of the day. You go in yourself."
"Well, I only enjoy it about a third as much to go alone," says she.
"The dogs don't differ when I'm along, you know, lady," says he, smiling.
"You know that isn't what I mean," she says.
And she looked over at him, and smiled at his eyes with her eyes. But I saw that he looked away first, sort of troubled. And I thought:
"Why, she acts as if not enjoying things when he ain't along is a kind of joyful sacrifice, that would please any man. I wonder if it does."
It happened two-three times through dinner. She hadn't been over to see some kind of a collection, and couldn't he come home some night early and take her? He couldn't promise – why didn't she go herself and tell him about it?
"You wouldn't have said that three years ago," she says, half fun, half earnest, and waited for him to deny it. But he didn't seem to sense what was expected of him, and he just et on.
Ain't it funny how you can sort of see things through the pores of your skin? By the time dinner was over, I knew most as much about those two as if I had lived in the house with them a week.
He was wonderful tender with her, though. I don't mean just in little loverlike ways, saying things and calling her things and looking at her gentle. I mean in ways that don't have to be said or called or looked, but that just are. To my mind they mean a thousand times more. But I thought that in her heart she sort of hankered for the said and called and looked kind. And of course they are nice. Nice, but not vital like the other sort. If you had to get along without one, you know which one would be the one.
When we went into the other room, Ellen took me to look at the baby, in bed, asleep, same as a kitten and a rosebud and a little yellow chicken, and all the things that you love even the names of. And when we went back, Ellen went to the piano and begun to play rambley things but low so's you could hardly hear them across the room, on account of the baby. I sank down and was listening, contented, and thinking of the most thinkable things I knew, when she looked over her shoulder.
"Russell," she says, "if you'll come and turn the music, I'll do that new Serenade."
Russell was on a couch, stretched out with a newspaper and his pipe, and I dunno if I ever seen a man look more luxurious. But he got up, sort of a one-joint-at-a-time fashion, and came slumping over, with his hair sticking out at the back. He stood and turned the music, with his pipe behind him. And when she'd got through, he says:
"Very pretty, indeed. Now I'll just finish my article, I guess, dear."
He went back to his couch. And she got up, kind of quick, and walked over and stared into the fire. And I got up and went over and stared out the window. It seemed kind of indelicate to be looking, when I knew so well what was happening in that room.
For she'd forgot he was a person. She was thinking that he was just another one of her. And that seems to me a terrible thing for any human being to get to thinking about another, married to them or not though they be.
When I looked out the window, I needed new words. I hadn't realized the elevator had skimmed up so high with me – and done it in the time it would have taken the Emporium elevator, home, to go the two stories. But we were up ten, I found afterward. And there I was looking the city plain in the face. Rows and rows and fields of little lights from windows that were homes – and homes – and homes. I'd never seen so many homes in my life before, at any one time. And it came over me, as I looked, that in all the hundreds of them I was looking at, and in the thousands that lay stretched out beyond, the same kind of thing must have gone on at some time or other, or be going to go on, or be going on now, like I saw clear as clear was going on with Ellen and Russell.
It was the third night I was there that the thing happened. I was getting along fine. I did the ordering and the managing and took part care of the baby and mended up clothes and did the dozens of things that Ellen wasn't strong enough to do. Delia and I had got to be real good friends by the second day.
Russell came home that third night looking fagged out. He was never nervous or impatient – I noticed that about him. I'd never once seen him take it out in his conversation with his wife merely because he had had a hard day. We'd just gone in from the dining-room when Russell, instead of lighting his pipe and taking his paper, turned round on the rug, and says:
"Dear, I think I'll go over to Beldon's a while to-night."
She was crossing the floor, and I remember how she turned and looked at him.
"Beldon's?" she said. "Have – have you some business?"
"No," Russell says. "He wanted me to come in and have a game of billiards."
"Very well," she says only, and she went and sat down by the fire.
He got into his coat, humming a little under his breath, and then he came over and stooped down and kissed her. She kissed him, but she hardly turned her head. And she didn't turn her head at all as he went out.
When he'd gone and she heard the apartment door shut, Ellen fairly frightened me. She sank down in the big chair where I had first seen her, and put her head on its arm, and cried – cried till her little shoulders shook, and I could hear her sobs. "Ellen," I says, "what is it?" Though, mind you, I knew well enough.
She put her arms round my neck as I kneeled down beside her. "Oh, Calliope, Calliope!" she says. "It's the end of things."
"End," says I, "of what?"
She looked in my face, with the tears streaming down hers. "Didn't you realize," she says, "that that is the first time my husband ever has left me in the evening – when he didn't have to?"
I saw that I had to be as wise as ten folks and as harmless as none, if I was to help her – and help him. And all at once I felt as if I was ten folks, and as if I'd got to live up to them all.
Because I didn't underestimate the minute. No woman can underestimate that minute when it comes to any other woman. For out of it there are likely to come down onto her the issues of either life or death; and the worst of it is that, ten to one, she never once sees that it's in her power, maybe, to say whether it shall be life or death that comes.
"What of it?" I says, as calm as if I didn't see anything at all, instead of seeing more than she saw, as I know I did.
She stared at me. "Don't you understand," she says, "what it means?"
"Why, it means," says I, "that he wants a game of billiards, the way any other man does, once in a while."
She shook her head, mournful.
"Three years ago this Winter," says she, "only three short years ago, every minute of the world that Russell had free, he wanted to spend with me. That Winter before we were married, do you suppose that anybody —anybody could have got him to play billiards with him if he could have been with me?"
I thought it over. "Well," I says, "no. Likely not. But then, you see, he couldn't be with you every evening – and that just naturally give him some nights off."
"'Some nights off,'" she says. "Oh, if you think that is the way he looks at it – There is no way in this world that I would rather spend my evenings," she says, "than to sit here with my husband."
"Yes," I says, "I s'pose that's true. I s'pose that's true of most wives. And it's something they've got to get over thinking is so important."
She gasped. "Get over – " she says. "Then," says she, "they'll have to get over loving their husbands."
"Oh, dear, no, they won't – no, they won't," says I. "But they'll have to get over thinking that selfishness is love – for one thing. Most folks get them awful mixed – I've noticed that."
But she broke down again, and was sobbing on the arm of the chair. "To think," she says over, "that now it'll never, never be the same again. From now on we're going to be just like other married folks!"
That seemed to me a real amazing thing to say, but I saw there wasn't any use talking to her, so I just let her cry till it was time to go and feed the baby. And then she sat nursing him, and breathing long, sobbing breaths – and once I heard her say, "Poor, poor little Mother's boy!" with all the accent on the relationship.
I walked back into the middle of the long, soft, wine-colored room, trying to think if I s'posed I'd got so old that I couldn't help in a thing like this, for I have a notion that there is nothing whatever that gets the matter that you can't help some way if you're in the neighborhood of it.
Delia was just shutting the outside door of the apartment. And she came trotting in with her little, formal, front-door air.
"Two ladies to see you, Miss Marsh," she says. "Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb."
No sooner said than heard, and I flew to the door, all of a tremble.
"For the land and forevermore," says I. "Where from and what for?"
There they stood in the doorway, dressed, I see at first glance, in the very best they'd got. Mis' Holcomb, that is the most backward-feeling of any of our women, was a step behind Mis' Toplady, and had hold of her arm. And Mis' Toplady was kind of tiptoeing and looking round cautious, to see if something not named yet was all right.
"There ain't any company, is there?" she says, in a part-whisper.
"No," says I, "not a soul. Come on in."
"Well," says she, relaxing up on her bones, "I asked the girl, and she says she'd see. What's the use of being a hired girl if you don't know who you've let in?"
"Sit down," says I, "and tell me what you're doing here, and why you've come. Is anything the matter? I see there ain't, though – with you in your best clothes. Throw off your things."
"Calliope," says Mis' Holcomb, "you'd never guess." She leaned forward in her chair. "We ain't come up for a single thing," says she, "not a thing!"
Mis' Toplady leaned forward, too. "And the fare a dollar and ninety-six cents each way," says she, "and us a-staying at a hotel!"
"Go on," says I. "How long you going to be here?"
"Oh, mercy, only to-night," Mis' Holcomb says. "Why, the room is two-fifty just for us to sleep in it. I told him we shouldn't be setting in it a minute, but I guess he didn't believe me."
"Well, go on," says I. "Tell me what you've come for?"
Mis' Toplady leaned back and looked round her and sighed – and anybody could of told that her sigh was pleased and happy.
"Calliope," says she, "we've run away to stay overnight and one day on our chicken money, because we got so dead tired of home."
