"'Well,' says Mis' Amanda Toplady--I rec'lect she hed been puttin' up a big Japanese umbrella, an' she looked out from under it sort o' sweet an' sincere an' dreamy--'you've got to be a woman an' you've got to live in a little town before you know what a letter really is. I don't think these folks that hev lots o' mail left in the front hall in the mornin'--an' sometimes get one that same afternoon--_knows_ about letters at all. An' I don't believe any man ever knows, sole except when he's in love. To sense what a letter is you've got to be a woman without what-you-may-say much to enjoy; you've got to hear the train whistle that might bring you one; you've got to calculate how long it'll take 'em to distribute the mail, an' mebbe hurry to get your bread mixed, or your fried-cakes out o' the lard, or your cannin' where you can leave it--an' then go change your shoes an' slip on another skirt, an' poke your hair up under your hat so's it won't show, an' go down to the post-office in the hot sun, an' see the letter through the glass, there in your own box, waitin' for you. That minute, when your heart comes up in your throat, I tell you, is gettin' a letter.' "We all knew this is so--every one of us. "'It's just like that when you write 'em, only felt differ'nt,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I do mine to my sister a little at a time--I keep it back o' the clock in the kitchen an' hide the pencil inside the clock door, so's it won't walk off, the way pencils do at our house. An' then, right in the midst of things, be it flour or be it suds, I can scratch down what comes in my head, till I declare sometimes I can hardly mail it for readin' it over an' thinkin' how she'll like to get it.' "'My, my!' says Mis' Sykes, reminiscent, ''specially since Silas has been postmaster an' we've had so much to do with other people's letters, I've been so hungry for letters of my own that I've wrote for samples. I can do that with a level conscience because, after all, you do get a new dress now an' then. But I couldn't answer advertisements, same as some, when I didn't mean true--just to get the letters back. That don't seem to me rill honest.' "An' then I owned up. "'Last week, when I paid my taxes,' I says, 'I whipped out o' the clerk's office quick, sole so's he'd hev to mail me my tax receipt. But he didn't do it. He sent it over by their hired girl that noon. I love letters like I do my telephone bell an' my friends,' I know I says. "An' there was all that hundred letters or so--letters that somebody had put love in for Jem Pitlaw, an' that he'd read love out of an' saved 'em--there they was goin' to be sold for all Friendship Village to read, includin' some that hadn't even known him, mebbe more than to speak to.