That's the way it goes with us--one bereavement after another. It's mighty hard to be a mother of sons in Homeburg. I worked in the post-office for a year once--handed out mail--and I got to know just exactly what most of the mothers in town wanted. I could please them with a new magazine and mystify them with a circular or a business letter. But if I wanted to light them up until they took the shadows out of the corners as they went out, I would give them a letter from a son, way off somewhere, making good. The best of them didn't write any too often. Once a week is pretty regular, I suppose, from the other end; but you should see the mother begin to come in hungry again the second day after her letter came. And when a boy came home successful and prosperous, and his proud mother towed him down Main Street on pretense of getting him to carry a spool of thread home for her, it used to go to my heart to see the wistful looks of her women friends. There is hardly a family in Homeburg of the right age which hasn't a grown-up son off at war somewhere--fighting failure. It's grand when they win; but I hate to think of some of our boys who haven't come back. If it's hard on the mothers, it's even harder on the Homeburg girls. They say there are one hundred thousand old maids in Massachusetts. I'll bet that's just about the number of Massachusetts young men who have gone West or somewhere, and haven't remembered the things they said at parting as well as the girls did. We've got plenty of girls in Homeburg who are getting intimately acquainted with the thirties--fine girls, still pretty, bright, and keeping up with the world. Young men come into town and do their best to get on a "thou-beside-me" footing, but somehow the girls don't seem to marry. At the root of almost every case there's an old Homeburg boy. Maybe he's making good somewhere, and they're both waiting until he does. Maybe he isn't making good and is too proud to ask her to wait. Maybe she's waiting alone--because some other girl was handier in the new place. And maybe it wasn't a case of wait at all, only the boy who went away looked better to some Homeburg girl than any of those who stayed at home. That was the case with Sam Flanburg and Minnie Briggs a few years ago.