By the time Peter and I were out alone on Daphne Street again, the sitting rooms in all the houses were dark, with a look of locked front doors--as if each house had set its lips together with, "We are a home and you are not." Peter looked out on all this palpable householdry. "See the lights upstairs," he said; "everybody's up there, hearing their prayers and giving 'em fever medicine. Yes, sir, Great Scott! Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade--they ain't good for a thing in the cannery. And yet they know...." XIV POSTMARKS Between church service and Sunday School we of the First church have so many things to attend to that no one can spare a moment. "Reverent things, not secular," Calliope explains, "plannin' for church chicken-pie suppers an' Christmas bazaars and like that; but not a word about a picnic, not even if they was to be one o' Monday sunrise." To be sure, this habit of ours occasionally causes a contretemps. As when one morning Mis' Toplady arrived late and, in a flurry, essayed to send up to the pulpit by the sexton a Missionary meeting notice to be read. Into this notice the minister plunged without the precaution of first examining it, and so delivered aloud:-- "See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags. "See Abigail about enough forks for her table. "Look around for my rubbers. "Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents." Not until he reached the fourth item was the minister stopped by the agonized rustle in a congregation that had easily recognized Mis' Toplady's "between services" list of reminder, the notice of the forthcoming meeting being safe in her hymn book. Still we persist in our Sabbath conferences when "everybody is there where you want 'em an' everybody can see everybody an' no time lost an' no party line listening"; and it is then that those who have been for some time away from the village receive their warmest welcome. I am not certain that the "I must get down to church and see everybody" of a returned neighbour does not hold in fair measure the principles of familyhood and of Christ's persuadings to this deep comradeship. It was in this time after church that we welcomed Calliope one August Sunday when she had unexpectedly come down from town on the Saturday night. And later, when the Sunday-school bell had rung, I waited with her in the church while she looked up her Bible, left somewhere in the pews. When she had found it, she opened it in a manner of eager haste, and I inadvertently saw pasted to the inside cover a sealed letter, superscription down, for whose safety she had been concerned. I had asked her to dine with me, and as we walked home together she told me about the letter and what its sealed presence in her Bible meant.