With that I looked over at Silas, and I see him with the scarcest thing in the world for him--a little pinch of a smile on his face. Just for a minute he met my eyes. Then he looked down to get his hand a little farther away from where the old hen in the coop had been picking it. And the other thing that happened was that up in front of me come running little Mrs. Bitty Marshall, and her eyes was full of tears. “Oh, Mis’ Marsh,” she says, “what do you s’pose I done? I come off and left my lace curtain. I took it down first thing and pinned it up in a paper to bring. And then I come off and left it.” Before I could say a word Silas answered her: “The water’ll never get up that far, Mis’ Marshall,” he says, “don’t you worry. Don’t you worry one bit. But,” says he, “if anything does happen to it, Mis’ Marshall, I’ll tell you now you can have as good a one as we’ve got in the store, _on me_. There now, you’ve had a present to-day a’ready!” I guess she thanked him. I donno. All I remember is that pretty soon everybody begun to move towards town and I moved with ’em. And while we walked the whole thing kind of begun to take hold of me, what it meant, and things that had been coming to me all the morning came to me all together--and I wanted to chant ’em a chant, like Deborah (but pronounced Déborah when it’s a relative). And I wanted to say: “O Lord, look down on these eighty families, old and young and real young, that we’ve lived neighbor to all our lives, and yet we don’t know half of ’em, either by name or by face, till now. Till now! “And some of them we do know individual has showed up here to-day with a back-ground of families, wives and children they’ve got, just like anybody--Tippie that drives the dray and that’s helped moved everybody; for twelve years he’s moved my refrigerator out and my cook stove in, and vicious verses, as regular as Spring come and Autumn arrived; and there all the time he had a wife, with a cameo pin, and three little Tippies in plaid skirts and pink cheeks, asking everybody for a drink of water just like your own child, and one of ’em so nice that he might of been anybody’s instead of just Tippie’s. “And Mamie Felt, that does up lace curtains of them that can afford to have ’em done up and dries ’em on a frame so’s they hang straight and not like a waterfall with its expression blowing sideways, same as mine do--there’s Mamie with her old mother and a cripple brother that we’ve never guessed about, and that she was doing for all the whole time.