“Will all them that’s interested in seeing Friendship Village made as much a town as it could be, for all of us and for the children of all of us, meet together in Post-Office Hall to-morrow night, at 7 o’clock, to talk over if we’re doing it as good as we could.” For there was business. And then there was big business. But the biggest business is taking employers and employees, and all men and women--yes, and inmates too--and turning them into folks. THE PRODIGAL GUEST Aunt Ellis wrote to me: “DEAR CALLIOPE: Now come and pay me the visit. You’ve never been here since the time I had sciatica and was cross. Come now, and I’ll try to hold my temper and my tongue.” I wrote back to her: “I’ll come. I was saving up to buy a new cook-stove next fall, but I’ll bring my cook-stove and come in time for the parade. I did want to see that.” She answered: “Mercy, Calliope, I might have known it! You always did love a circus in the village, and these women are certainly making a circus parade of themselves. However, we’ll even drive down to see them do it, if you’ll really come. Now you know how much I want you.” “I might have known,” I said to myself, “that Aunt Ellis would be like that. The poor thing has had such an easy time that she can’t help it. She thinks what’s been, is.” She wrote me that she was coming in from the country an hour after my train got there, but that the automobile would be there for me. And I wrote her that I would come down the platform with my umbrella up, so’s her man would know me; and so I done, and he picked me out real ready. When we got to her big house, that somehow looked so used to being a big house, there was a little boy sitting on the bottom step, half asleep, with a big box. “What’s the matter, lamb?” I says. “Beg pad’, ma’am, he’s likely waitin’ to beg,” says the chauf---- that word. “I’d go right by if I was you.” But the little fellow’d woke up and looked up. “I can’t find the place,” he says, and stuck out his big box. The man looked at the label. “They ain’t no such number in this street,” says he. “It’s a mistake.” The little fellow kind of begun to cry, and the wind was blowing up real bitter. I made out that him and his family made toys for the uptown shops, and somebody in our neighborhood had ordered some direct, and he was afraid to go home without the money. I didn’t have any money to give him, but I says to the chauf---- “Ask him where he lives, will you? And see if we’d have time to take him home before Mis’ Winthrop’s train gets in.” The chauf---- done it, some like a prime minister, and he says, cold, he thought we’d have time, and I put the baby in the car. He was a real sweet little fellow, about seven. He told me his part in making the toys, and his mother’s, and his two little sisters’, and I give him the rest o’ my lunch, and he knew how to laugh when he got the chance, and we had a real happy time of it. And we come to his home.