The next night us ladies got down to the hall early to do the finishing touches. And on Daphne Street, on my way down, I met Bess Bones again, kind of creeping along. She’d stopped to pat the nose of a horse standing patient, hitched outside the barber-shop saloon--- I’ve seen Bess go down Daphne Street on market-days patting the nose of every horse one after another. “Hello, Mis’ Marsh,” Bess says. “Are you comin’ down with another meeting?” “Yes, sir, Bess,” I says, “I am.” And then a thought struck me. “Bess,” I says--able now to hold up my head like my skull intended, because I felt I could ask her--“you come on up, too--you’re invited to-night. Everybody is.” Her face lit up, like putting the curtain up. “Honest, can I?” she says. “I’d love to go to a meeting again--I’ve looked in the window at ’em a dozen times. I’ll get my bread and be right up.” I tell you, Post-Office Hall looked nice. We’d got in a few rugs and plants, and the refreshment table stood acrost one corner, with a screen around the gas-plate, and the cups all piled shiny and the sandwiches covered with white fringed napkins. And about seven o’clock in come three pieces of the Friendship Village Stonehenge Band we’d got to give their services, and they begun tuning up, festive. And us ladies stood around with our hands under our white aprons; and you’d have thought it was some nice, human doings instead of just duty. Before much of anybody else had got there, in come them we’d invited first: Absalom Ricker and Gertie, her looking real nice with a new-ironed bow to her neck, and him brushed up in Timothy’s old coat and his hair trained to a high peak. And the Bettses--Joe with his beard expected to cover up where there wasn’t a necktie and her pretending the hall was chilly so’s to keep her cloak on over whatever wasn’t underneath. And the Haskitts, him snapping and snarling at her, and her trying to hush him up by agreeing with him promiscuous. And Mis’ Henning that her husband didn’t show up. We heard afterwards he was down in the barber-shop saloon, dressed up to come but backed out after. And most everybody else come--not only the original ’leven, but some of the telephone folks, and some that the refreshment-bait always catches. Silas come in late--he’d had to wait and distribute the mail--and when he see the Rickers and the rest of them, he come tearing over to us women in the refreshment corner. “My dum!” he says, “look at them folks setting down there--Rickerses and Henningses and Bettses and them--how we goin’ to manage with them here? The idear of their coming to the meeting!” “Ain’t it some their meeting, Silas?” I says. “The whole society was formed on their account. Seems to me they’ve got a right--just like in real United States Congress doings.” “But, my dum, woman,” says Silas, “how we going to take up their cases and talk ’em over with them setting there, taking it all in? Ain’t you got no delicacy to you?” he ends up, ready to burst.