And I says right out loud to the village--just like Friendship Village was a person, with its face turned toward me, listening: “Why, you ain’t half of us--nor you ain’t some of us. You’re all of us! And you must of known it all the time.” THE FLOOD _It’s “brother” now and it’s “brother” then,_ _And it’s “brother” another day,_ _And it’s “brother” whenever a loud doom sounds_ _With a terrible toll to pay...._ _But what of the silent dooms they bear_ _In an inoffensive way?_ _It’s “brother” here and it’s “brother” there,_ _And it’s “brother” once in a while,_ _And it’s “brother” whenever an hour hangs black_ _On the face of the common dial...._ _But what of the days that stretch between_ _For the march of the rank and file?_ I don’t know how well you know villages, but I hope you know anyhow one, because if you don’t they’s things to life that you don’t know yet. Nice things. I was thinking of that the Monday morning that all Friendship Village remembers still. I was walking down Daphne Street pretty early, seeing everybody’s breakfast fire smoke coming out of the kitchen chimney and hearing everybody’s little boy splitting wood and whistling out in the chip pile, and smelling everybody’s fried mush and warmed-up potatoes and griddle cakes come floating out sort of homely and old fashioned and comfortable, from the kitchen cook-stoves. “Look at the Family,” I says to myself, “sitting down to breakfast, all up and down the street.” And when the engine-house clock struck seven, and the whistle over to the brick-yard blew little and peepy and like it wasn’t sure it was seven but it thought so, and the big whistle up to the round-house blew strong and hoarse and like it knew it all and could tell you more about the time of day then you’d ever guessed if it wanted to, and the sun come shining down like the pouring out of some new thing that we’d never had before--I couldn’t help drawing a long breath, just because Now was Now. Down the walk a little ways I met Bitty Marshall. I wondered a little at seeing him on the street way up our end o’ town. He’d lately opened a little grocery store down on the Flats, for the Folks that lived down there. Him and his wife lived overhead, with a lace curtain to one of the front windows--though they was two front windows to the room. “I’ve always hankered for a pair o’ lace curtains,” she said to me when I went up to see her one day, “but when I’d get the money together to buy ’em, it seems like somethin’ has always come and et it up--medicine or school books or the children’s shoes. So when we moved in here, I says I was goin’ to have one lace curtain to one window if I board the other up!” And she had one to one window, and a green paper shade to the other. “Well, Bitty,” I says, “who’s keeping store to-day? Your wife?” But he didn’t smile gay, like he usually does. He looked just regular.