In a minute I come past Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman’s house. The Chief has been dead several years, but we always keep calling her by his title, same as we call the vacant lot by the depot the Ellsworth House, though the Ellsworth House has been burned six years and it’s real kind of confusing to strangers that we try to direct. I remember one traveling man that headed right out towards the marsh and missed his train because some of us had told him to keep straight on till he turned the corner by the Ellsworth House, and he kept hunting for it and trusting in it till he struck the swamp. But you know how it is--you get to saying one thing, and you keep on uttering it after the thing is dead and gone and another has come in its place, and when somebody takes you up on it, like as not you’ll tell him he ain’t patriotic. It was the same with the Fire Chief. Dead though he was, we always give her his official title, because we’d got headed calling her that and hated to stop. She was out in her garden that morning, and I stood still when I caught sight of her tulips. They looked like the earth had broke open and let out a leak of what’s inside it, never intending to show so much at once. “Mis’ Merriman,” I says, “what tulips! Or,” says I, flattering, “is it a bon-fire, with lumps in the flame?” Mis’ Merriman was bending over, setting out her peony bulbs, with her back to me. When I first spoke, she looked over her shoulder, and then she went right on setting them out, hard as she could dig. “Glad you like _something_ that belongs to me,” says she, her words kind of punched out in places by the way she dug.