_Yet that and the consequent agonized signaling of one of the elders are within my memory, and are indelibly there because they occurred at the first funeral in my experience, and I could not account for the elder’s perturbation._ _Or, where among us now is the village dignitary who would take the platform to speak at the obsequies of a friend and would begin his eulogy with_: “_I have always had a great respect for the deceased, for--[pointing with his thumb downward at the coffin] for that gentleman down there._” _Or, when a deacon with squeaking shoes is passing the plate, in what modern village church is to be found the clergyman who will call out_: “_Brother, you’ll find my rubbers there in the lecture room. You best slip ’em on._” _Or the deacon who would instantly reply, overshoulder_: _“I’ve got a pair of me own,” and so go serenely on, squeaking, to the last pew._ _Yet these happened, not long ago, and we smile at the remembrance, knowing that just those things could not take place among us now. New absurdities occur. But there is a different humor, even of misadventure and the maladroit. Instead of deploring the old days, however, I think that nearly all of us say what I have heard a woman of ninety saying--not, “Things are not what they used to be in the old days,” but_: “_Well, I’m thankful that I’ve lived to see so many things different._” _That is the way in which we grow old in the little towns of the Middle West. We are not afraid to know that old ways of laughter and old flavors of incident depart, with the old ills. Since disease and marching armies and the like are to leave us, humor and sentimentalism of a sort and gold lace of many sorts must likewise be foregone. We say: “The day is dead. Long be the day.” May we not boast of it? For such adaptation would not be wonderful in a city, where impressions crowd and are cut off. But it stands for a special and precious form of vitality, in little towns._ _It is for this acceptance of growth that our days of pioneering together and our slow drawing together of later years form a solid basis. For we are knit, and now the fabric is beginning to be woven into a garment. Some are alarmed at the lack of seams, some anxiously question the color, some shake their heads and say that it will never fit. But there are those of us here in the village who think that we understand._ _And now we are beginning to suspect that there is more to understand than we have guessed. For there was some one “From Away” who came to us and said_: “_Your little town is a piece of to-morrow. Once a village was a source of quiet and content and prettiness. Once a village was withdrawn from what is going forward in the world. But now the village is the very source of our salvation, social and artistic. It is not that we are finding humanity at its best in the villages, but that there humanity is at the point where it is most in type. And in this lie the hidings of our power._”