Life was very good this summer afternoon when half the village gathered on our lawn above the singing stone, at Miggy's and Peter's "Announcement Supper." To be sure, all Friendship Village had for several days had the news and could even tell you when the betrothal took place and where; but the two were not yet engaged, as Miggy would have said, "out loud." "What _is_ engaged?" asked Little Child, who was the first of my guests to arrive, and came bringing an offering of infinitesimal flowers which she finds in the grass where I think that they bloom for no one else. "It means that people love each other very much--" I began, and got no further. "Oh, goody grand," cried Little Child. "Then I'm engaged, aren't I? To everybody." Whenever she leads me in deep water, I am accustomed to invite her to a dolphin's back by bidding her say over some song or spell which I have taught her. This afternoon while we waited on the lawn and her little voice went among the charmed words, something happened which surely must have been due to a prank of the dolphin. For when she had taken an accurate way to the last stanza of "Lucy," Little Child soberly concluded:-- "'She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and what's The difference to me!'" But, even so, it was charming to have had the quiet metre present. I hope that there is no one who has not sometime been in a company on which he has looked and looked with something living in his eyes; on a company all of whom he holds in some degree of tenderness. It was so that I looked this afternoon on those who came across the lawn in the pleasant five o'clock sun, and I looked with a difference from my manner of looking on that evening of my visit to the village, when I first saw these, my neighbours. Then I saw them with delight; now I see them with delight-and-that-difference; and though that difference is, so to say, partly in my throat, yet it is chiefly deep in my understanding. There came my Mis' Amanda Toplady, with her great green umbrella, which she carries summer and winter; Mis' Postmaster Sykes, with the full-blooming stalk of her tuberose pinned on her left shoulder; Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss in the pink nun's veiling of the Post-office hall supper; and my neighbour, who had consented to come, with: "I donno as that little thing would want I should stay home. Oh, but do you know, that's the worst--knowin' that the little thing never saw me and can't think about me at all!" And there came also those of whom it chances that this summer I have seen less than I should have wished: the Liberty sisters, in checked print. "It don't seem so much of a jump out of mournin' into wash goods as it does into real dress-up cloth," gentle Miss Lucy says. And Abigail Arnold, of the Home Bakery, who sent a great sugared cake for to-day's occasion. "Birthday cakes is correct," she observed, "an' weddin' cake is correct.