I looked out the window to see where we were getting, and there we were drawing over the Flats outside Friendship Village, and the brakeman came to the door and shouted the name. When I hear the name that way, and when I see the Fair ground and the Catholic church steeple and the canal bridge and the old fort and the gas house, it's always as sweet as something new, and as something old, and it's something sweeter than either. It makes me feel happy and good and like two folks instead of one. "Look here," I said, brisk, "this is where I get off. This is home. And I'm going to take this baby with me. You go on to your visiting place--so be you'll help me off," I says, "with my baby and my bundles that's for half of Friendship Village." "Friendship Village!" he said over, as if he hadn't heard the man call. "Is this Friendship Village? Why, then this," he said, "is where I'm going too. This is where the Proudfits live, isn't it?" he said--and he said some more, meditative, about towns acting so important over having one name and not another, when nobody can remember either name. But I hardly heard him. He was going to the Proudfits'. And without knowing how I knew it, I knew all over me, all of a sudden, who he was: That he was the Novel-and-Poem man himself. "You _can't_ be him!" I said aloud. I don't know what I was looking for--a man with wings or what. But it wasn't for somebody like this--all simple and still and every day--like stars coming out. "You can't be him," says I, mentioning his name. "He was to get here this afternoon on the Through." "That alone would prove I'm I," he said, merry. "I always miss the Throughs." Think of that.... There I'd been riding all that way beside him, talking to him as familiar as if he had been just folks. It seems a dream when I think of it now. The Proudfits' automobile was there for him too--because he had telegraphed that he would take the next train--as well as for me and the chocolate peppermints and the red candles. And so, before I could think about me being me sure enough, there I was in the Proudfits' car, glassed in and lit up, and a stranger-baby in my arms; and beside me the Novel-and-Poem man that was the Brother-man too,--the man that had made me talk through walls with everything there is. Oh, and how I wanted to tell him! And when I tried to tell him what he had meant to me, how do you guess it came out of my brain? "I've read your book," says I, like a goose. But he seemed real sort of pleased. "I've been honored," he said, gentle. I looked up at him; and I knew how he knew already that I didn't know all the hard parts in the book, and all the big words, and some of the little nice things he had tried to work out to suit him. And it seemed as if any praise of mine would only make him hurt with not being appreciated. Still, I wanted my best to say something out of the gratitude in me. "It--helped," I said; and couldn't say more to save me.