"In the name of our whole town," she says to that young soldier, "we thank _you_ for what you've done." He just nodded a little, and nobody said anything more. And it came to me that most everything is more so than we most always suppose it to be. When Mis' Toplady don't know quite what to do with a minute, she always brings her hands together in a sort of spontaneous-sounding clap, and kind of bustles her shoulders. She done that now. "I motion I'll take charge of the refreshments," she says. "Who'll volunteer? I'm crazy to see what-all we've brought." Everybody laughed, and rustled, easy. And I slipped over to the daughter, standing by herself by the fire-place. "You take, don't you?" I ask' her. "'Take?'" she says, puzzled. "Music, I mean," I told her. (We always mean music when we say "take" in Friendship Village.) "No," she says, "but my brother plays, sometimes." The soldier sat down to the piano, when I asked him, and he played, soft and strong, and something beautiful. His cross shone on his breast when he moved. And me, I stood by the piano, and I heard the soul of the music come gentling through his soul, just like it didn't make any difference to the music, one way or the other.... Music. Music that spoke. Music that sounded like laughing voices.... No, for it was laughing voices.... I opened my eyes, and there in my dining-room, by the lounge, stood Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb, laughing at me for being asleep. Then they sat down by me, and they didn't laugh any more. "Calliope," Mis' Toplady says, "Mis' Sykes has been round to everybody, and told them about the Oldmoxon House folks." "And she took a vote on what to do to-night," says Mame Holcomb. "Giving a little advice of her own, by the wayside," Mis' Toplady adds. I sat up and looked at them. With the soldier's music still in my ears, I couldn't take it in. "You don't mean--" I tried to ask them. "That's it," says Mis' Toplady. "Everybody voted to have a public meeting to honor the soldiers--the colored soldier with the rest. But that's as far as it will go." "But he don't want to be honored!" I cried. "He wants to be neighbored--the way anybody does when they're worth it." "Mis' Sykes says," says Mis' Toplady, "that we mustn't forget what is fitting and what isn't." And Mis' Holcomb added: "She carried it off grand. Everybody thinks just the way she does." My reception-surprise cake stood ready on the table. After a while, we three sat down around it, and cut it for ourselves. But all the while we ate, that soldier's music was still playing for me; and what hadn't happened was more real for me than the things that were true. THE BROTHER-MAN[9]