"I ain't ever read it," Calliope explained to me wistfully. "Every one o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle has got one, an' none of us has ever read 'em. It ain't my letter, so to say. It's one o' the Jem Pitlaw collection. The postmark," she imparted, looking up at me proudly, "is Bombay, India." At my question about the Jem Pitlaw collection she laughed deprecatingly, and then she sighed. ("Ain't it nice," she had once said to me, "your laughs hev a sigh for a linin', an' sighs can hev laughin' for trimmin'. Only trouble is, most folks want to line with trimmin's, an' they ain't rill durable, used that way.") "Jem Pitlaw," Calliope told me now, "used to be schoolmaster here--the kind that comes from Away an' is terrible looked up to on that account, but Jem deserved it. He knew all there was _to_ know, an' yet he thought we knew some little things, too. We was all rill fond of him, though he kept to himself, an' never seemed to want to fall in love, an' not many of us knew him well enough to talk to at all familiar. But when he went off West on a vacation, an' didn't come back, an' never come back, an' then died, Friendship Village mourned for him,--sincere, though no crape,--an' missed him enormous. "He'd had a room at Postmaster Sykes's--that was when he was postmaster first an' they was still humble an' not above the honest penny. An' Jem Pitlaw left two trunks an' a sealed box to their house. An' when he didn't come back in two years, Silas Sykes moved the things out of the spare room over to the post-office store loft. An' there they set, three years on end, till we got word Jem was dead--the very week o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle's Ten Cent Tropical Fête. Though, rilly, the Tropical Fête wasn't what you might say 'tropical.' It was held on the seventeenth of January, an' that night the thermometer was twenty-four degrees below on the bank corner. Nor it wasn't rilly what you might say a Fête, either. But none o' the Circle regretted them lacks. A lack is as good as a gift, sometimes.