We all began moving back to the village, before much of anybody knew it--the automobile with Jeffro in it, and Jeffro's wife, and Jeffro's little boy. And with the car went, not soldiers, not flags, not the singing of any one nation's airs--but the children, with those symbols of the life that is living and building life--as fast as we'll let it build. Jeffro didn't know what they were, I guess--though he knew the love and the kindliness and the peace of the time. But I knew, and more of us knew, that in that hour lay all the promise of the new day, when we understand what we are: Gods, fallen into a pit. We went up the street with the children singing: "Don't you wish we all could be What we know we are, 'Way inside, where a Voice speaks, Far--and near--and far?" When we got to Jeffro's gate, Mis' Sykes came past me. "Ain't it sad?" she says. "Not a soldier, nor a patriotic song, nor a flag to meet our hero?" I looked at her, kind. I felt kind to all the world, because somehow I felt so sure, so certain sure, of things. "Don't you worry, Mis' Sykes," I says. "I kind of feel as if more was here to meet Jeffro than we've any notion of." For it was one of the times when what you thought was the earth under your feet dissolves away, and nothing is left there but a little bit of dirt, with miles of space just on the under side of it. It was one of the times when what you thought was the sky over your head is drawn away like a cloth, and nothing is there but miles of space high on the upper side of it. And in between these two great spaces are us little humans, kind of creeping round--wondering what we're for. FOOTNOTE: [11] Copyright, 1915, _The Woman's Home Companion_. "FOLKS"[12] I dunno whether you like to go to a big meeting or not? Some folks seem to dread them. Well, I love them. Folks never seem to be so much folks as when I'm with them, thousands at a time. Well, once annually I go to what's a big meeting for us, on the occasion of the Friendship Village Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality's yearly meeting.... I always hope folks won't let that name of us bother them. We don't confine our attention to Cemetery any more. But that's been the name of us for twenty-four years, and we got started calling it that and we can't bear to stop. You know how it is--be it institutions or constitutions or ideas or a way to mix the bread, one of our deformities is that we hate to change. "Seems to me," says Mis' Postmaster Sykes once, "if we should give up that name, we shouldn't be loyal nor decent nor loving to the dead." "Shucks," says I, "how about being loyal and decent and loving to the living?" "Your mind works so queer sometimes, Calliope," says Mis' Sykes, patient. "Yes--well," I says, "mebbe. But anyhow, it works. It don't just set and set and set, and never hatch nothing."