"'Tell it now,' says the voice. 'Is it a story? Tell it now.' "And there was Christopher, wide awake where he had been set down rude on my knee, and looking up at them, patient. "'I was dreamin' my dream,' he explained, polite. 'It was about all the nice things there is: You and you and you and hot ice-cream and the house's party.... Is they any more?' he asked, anxious. "Robin put out her arms for him, and she and Insley and I smiled at one another over his head. "'Ever so many more,' we told him. "I slipped out then and found Mis' Emmons, and I guess I come as near shining as anything that's like me can. "'What's the matter?' she says to me. 'You look as if you'd turned up the wick.' "'I did. They have. I won't tell,' I says. 'Oh, Mis' Emmons, I guess the meeting to-night won't need to adopt Christopher.' "She looked up at me quick, and then she started shining, too. "'What a universe it is,' she says, '--what a universe it is.' "Then we went off down to the meeting together. And the village was wonderful to go through, like a home some of us had hollowed out of the hills and was living in, common. As we went walking to the schoolhouse, the sidewalks seemed to me no more than ways dickered up to fasten us together, and to fasten us to them whose feet had wore the road before us, and to lead us to them that was coming, coming after: Christopher and Eph and Spudge Cadoza and Otie Daniel, or them like these. Otie Daniel had died the night before. Dr. Barrows had said Eph would not be lame, but we see he wan't sure of the value of the boy's physical life. But even so, even so we had a chance with Chris, and we had a chance with Spudge, and we had millions more. My feet wanted to run along them roads to meet the millions and my fingers tingled to get things ready. And as we went down Daphne Street to that meeting, I see how we all _was_ getting things ready, and I could of sung out for what I saw:-- "For Mame Holcomb, sprinkling clothes on the back porch and hurrying to get to the hall. "For Mis' Uppers, picking her currants before she went, so's to get an early start on her jam in the morning. "For Viny Liberty, setting sponge for her bread loud enough so we heard her clear out in the street, and for Libby, shutting up her chicken coop that they earned their own living with. "For Mis' Toplady, driving by with Timothy, and her in the brown silk she'd made herself, like she's made all she's got. "For Abagail Arnold, wiping out her window to be filled to-morrow with the pies of her hand. "For little Mis' Sparks, rocking her baby on the front stoop and couldn't come to the meeting at all, 'count of having nobody to leave him with.