Then the children begin coming back. There is a great difference between Homeburg and New York regarding children. In New York a child is personal property. But in Homeburg a child belongs to the whole town. A birth notice is a real news item in Homeburg. I suppose every baby is personally inspected by at least two hundred citizens. We criticize their care and feeding, suggest spanking when they are a little older, quiver unanimously with horror when they begin to "flip" freight trains, or get scarlet fever, and watch them grow up as eagerly as you New Yorkers watched the Woolworth Building. When they are graduated from high school we are all there with bouquets and presents, and we have an equity in the whole brood. Molly Strawn, the washerwoman's daughter, got more flowers than any one last year. And when they leave town to get a job, if they are boys, or when some rude outsider breaks in with a marriage license and despoils us of them, if they are girls, we all feel the loss. That's why Christmas means so much more to us. At Christmas time the town children come home. Will Askinson comes home from Chicago. He's doing very well up there, and it takes him two hours to get the length of Main Street on the first day after he arrives. Every one has to hear about it. Sadie Gastit comes home from Des Moines with a baby; regular custom of hers. Sometimes she makes the same baby do for two years, but usually it's a new one. I remember Sadie when she was only knee high to a grasshopper, and her mother spanked her for climbing the Republican flagpole during the McKinley campaign. The Flint children come down from Chicago to visit their aunt. There were only a boy and girl when they left fifteen years ago. Now there are eleven, counting wife, husband, and acquisitions. Last year Ad Bridge brought a new wife home from Denver to show us. Year before last Miss Annie Simms, who has been teaching in Minneapolis, brought down a young man to show to her family. She was going to be exclusive about it, but did it work? Not much. She had to show him all around. We just happened over there in droves. Everybody loves Annie and we were afraid for a little while that she was going to be an old maid. The young man will bring her down this year I suppose. They were married last June. All the Homeburg children and grandchildren arrive in the last two days before Christmas. They go home to their folks to deposit their baggage, and then they all come down-town to the post-office, to get the mail ostensibly but in reality to shake hands all around. The day before Christmas is one long reception on Main Street. The old town fairly hums.