So we continued to take down bill-boards and put in shrubbery and chase flies and dream beautiful, far-off dreams of sometime getting in sewerage, all under the same undying name. Well, at our annual meeting that night, we were discussing what should be our work the next year. And suggestions came in real sluggish, being the thermometer had been trying all day to climb over the top of its hook. Suggestions run about like this: _1. See about having seats put in the County House Yard._ _2. See about getting the blankets in the Calaboose washed oftener._ _3. Get trash baskets for the streets._ _4. Plant vines over the telegraph poles._ _5. See about Main Street billboards--again._ _6. See about the laundry soft coal smoke--again._ _7. See about window boxes for the library--again._ And these things were partitioned out to committees one by one, some to strike dry, shallow sand, some to get planted on the bare rock, and some to hit black dirt and a sunny spot with a watering can, or even a garden hose handy. You know them different sorts of soil under committees? Then up got Mis' Timothy Toplady--that dear, abundant woman. And we kind of rustled expectant, because Mis' Toplady is one of the women that looks across the edges of what's happening at the minute, and senses what's way over there beyond. She's one of the women that never shells peas without seeing beyond the rim of her pan. And that night she says to Sodality: "Ladies, I hear that up to the City next week there's going to be some kind of a woman's convention." Nobody said anything. Railroad wrecks, volcanoes, diamonds, conventions and such never seemed real _real_ to us in the village. "It seems to be some kind of a once-in-two-years affair," Mis' Toplady went on, "and I read in the paper how it had a million members, and how they came 10,000 to a time to their meetings. Well, now," she ends up, serene, "I've rose to propose that, bein' it's so near, Sodality send a delegate up there next week to get us some points." "What points do we need, I should like to know," says Mis' Postmaster Sykes, majestic. "Ain't we abreast of whatever there is to be abreast of?" "That's what I dunno," says Mis' Toplady. "Leave us find out." "Well," says Mis' Sykes, "my part, expositions and conventions are horrible to me. _I'm_ no club woman, anyhow," says she, righteous. All the keeping still I ever done in my life when I'd ought to wouldn't put nobody to sleep. I spoke right up. "Ain't our Sodality a club, Mis' Sykes?" I says. "Oh, our little private club here," says Mis' Sykes, "is one thing--carried on quiet and womanly among ourselves. But a great big public convention is no place for a woman that respects her home." "Why," I says, "Mis' Sykes, that was the way we were arguing when clubs began. It took quite a while to outgrow it. But ain't we past all that by now?"