For Friendship Village, in this particular, wasn’t any different from any other village or any other town or city of now. We had fifteen hundred folks and we had three churches, three ministers at Eight Hundred Dollars apiece annually, three cottage organs, three choirs, three Sunday School picnics in Summer, three Sunday School entertainments in Winter, three sets of repairs, carpets, conventions and delegates, and six stoves with the wood to buy to run ’em. And out of the fifteen hundred folks, from forty to sixty went to each church each Sunday. We were like that. In one respect, though, we differed from every other town. We had Lavvy Whitmore. Lavvy was the town soprano. She sung like a bird incarnate, and we all got her for Sunday School concerts and visiting ministers and special occasions in general. Lavvy didn’t belong to any church. She sort of boarded round, and we couldn’t pin her down to any one choir. “For one reason,” she said, “I haven’t got enough clothes to belong to any one choir. I’ve been driven distracted too many times looking at the same plaid waist and the same red bird and the same cameo pin in choirs to do it for anybody else. By kind of boarding round the way I do, I can give them all a change.” The young minister over to the White Frame church--young Elbert Kinsman--he took it harder than the rest. “How are your convictions, Miss Lavvy?” he had once been heard to say. “My convictions?” she answered him. “They are that there isn’t enough difference in the three to be so solemn and so expensive over. Especially the expensive,” she added. “Is there now?” “No,” young Elbert Kinsman had unexpectedly replied, “I myself don’t think there is. But----” “The only thing is,” Lavvy had put in irreverent, “_you_ can’t get rid of that ‘but,’ and I have!” “You send for Lavvy,” I says now to our minister’s wife. “She’ll think of something.” So there we were, with a kind of revival on our hands to plan before we knew it, because our minister’s wife was like that, much more like that than he was. He had a great deal of emphasis, but she had a great deal of force. Going home that morning, I went a little out of my way and come round by Shepherd’s Grove. Shepherd’s Grove lays just on the edge of the village, not far from the little grassy triangle in the residence part--and it always rests me to go there. Walking through it that morning I remember I thought: “Yes, I s’pose this kind of extry effort must be all right--even Nature enters into it real extensive. Every Summer is an extry effort--a real revival, I guess. But oh,” I says to myself, wishful, “that’s so spontaneous and unanimous! I wish’t folks was more like that....”