Silas was pinching, gingerish, at the hot stove-door handle, rather than take his coat-tail for a holder. “I s’pose _you’re_ satisfied,” he says. “You fed ’em, even if we didn’t get much done.” “Not get much done!” I says--“not get much done! Oh, Silas, what more did you want to do than we see done here to-night?” “Well, what kind of a _charity_ meeting was that?” says he, sour and bitter rolled into one. I went up to him with all of Mis’ Toplady’s fringed tea-napkins in my hands that it was going to take her most of the next day to do up. “Why, Silas,” I says, “I dunno if it was any kind of a charity meeting. But it was a town meeting. It was a folks’ meeting. It was a human meeting. Can’t you sense it? Can’t you sense it, Silas?” I put it to him: “We got something else besides charity going here to-night--as sure as the living sun.” “I like to know what?” he snaps back, and slammed the stove door. Mis’ Toplady, she looked at him tranquil over the tops of her two pairs of spectacles. “Something that’s in folks,” says she--and went on hunting up her spoons. THE TIME HAS COME When the minister’s wife sent for me that day, it was a real bad time, because I’d been doing up my tomato preserves and I’d stood on my feet till they was ready to come off. But as soon as I got the last crock filled, I changed my dress and pushed my hair up under my hat and thought I’d remember to keep my old shoes underneath my skirt. The minister’s parlor is real cool and shady--she keeps it shut up all day, and it kind of smells of its rose jar and its silk cushions and the dried grasses in the grate; and I sank down in the horse-hair patent rocker, and was glad of the rest. But I kept wondering what on earth the minister’s wife could want of me. It wasn’t the season for missionary barrels or lumberman’s literature--the season for them is house-cleaning time when we don’t know what all to do with the truck, and we take that way of getting rid of it and, same time, providing a nice little self-indulgence for our consciences. But this was the dead of Summer, and everybody sunk deep in preserves and vacations and getting their social indebtedness paid off and there wasn’t anything going around to be dutiful about for, say, a month or six weeks yet, when the Fall woke up, and the town begun to get out the children’s school-clothes and hunt ’em for moths. “Well, Calliope,” says the minister’s wife, “I s’pose you wonder what I’ve got important to say to you.” “True,” says I, “I do. But my feet ache so,” I says graceful, “I’m perfectly contented to set and listen to it, no matter what it is.”