City and town life -- Fiction; Foundlings -- Fiction
"Mis' Sykes and Mis' Toplady and me, seeing how Rob Henney stood
muttering and beat, and seeing how the day had gone, and seeing what was
what in the world and in all outside of it, we looked at each other,
dead tired, and real happy, and then we just dragged along home to our
kitchens and went to cooking supper. But oh, it wasn't our same old
kitchens nor it wasn't our same old Friendship Village. We was in places
newer and better and up higher, where we see how things are, and how
life would get more particular about us if we'd get particular about
some more of life.
VII
"Well, of course then we had Sixty Dollars or so to spend, and Sodality
never could rest a minute when it had money to do with if it wasn't
doing it, any more than it could rest when it had something to do and no
money to do with. It made a nice, active circle. Wishing for dreams to
come true, and then, when they do come true, making the true things
sprout more dreams, is another of them circles. I always think they're
what keeps us a-going, not only immortal but busy.
"And then with us there's another reason for voting our money prompt. As
soon as we've made any and the news has got out around, it's happened
two-three times that somebody has put in an application for a headstone
for somebody dead that can't afford one. The first time that was done
the application was made by the wife of a harness maker that had a
little shop in the back street and had been saving up his money for a
good tombstone. 'I ain't had much of a position here in life,' he used
to say. 'I never was pointed out as a leading citizen. But I'm goin' to
fix it so's when I'm buried and folks come to the Cemetery, nobody'll
get by my grave without noticin' my tombstone.' And then he took sick
with inflammatory rheumatism, and if it didn't last him three years and
et up his whole tombstone fund. He use' to worry about it considerable
as the rheumatism kept reducing the granite inch after inch, and he
died, thinking he wasn't going to have nothing but markers to him. So
his old wife come and told Sodality, crying to think he wasn't going to
seem no real true inhabitant of Cemetery, any more than he had of the
village. And we felt so sorry for her we took part of the Thirty Dollars
we'd made at the rummage sale and bought him a nice cement stone, and
put the verse on to attract attention that he'd wrote himself:--
"'STOP. LOOK. LISTEN.
HERE LAYS ME.
MY GRAVE IS JUST AS BIG
AS YOURS WILL BE.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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