All of a sudden, somebody started up "America." I don't know where they'd learned it. There aren't so very many chances for such as these to learn it very good. Some of them couldn't say a word of it, but they could all keep in tune. I saw the side faces of the Flats folks and the bunk car folks, while they hummed away, broken, at that tune that they knew about. Oh, if you want to know what to do next with your life, go somewhere and look at a foreigner in this country singing "America," when he doesn't know you're looking. I don't see how we rest till we get our land a little more like what he thinks it is. And while I was listening, it seemed as if Europe was there in the room. It was while they were singing that the magic began to work in us all. I remember how it started. "Oh," says Mis' Toplady, "ladies! Think of that little boy, and the other folks, living in those bunk cars. Don't it seem as if, while they're here, us ladies could--" "Don't it?" I says. "And the little skinny ones down on the Flats," Mis' Toplady whispers pretty soon. "Can't some of us teach them women how to feed them better and cost no more?" "And take care of them when they're sick," says Mame Holcomb. "I shouldn't wonder if they die when they don't need to, all day long." We see ideas gathering back of one another's eyes. And all of a sudden I thought of something else. "Ladies," I says, "and get sewerage down there on the Flats! Don't it belong there just exactly as much as in the residence part?" Us ladies all looked at each other. We'd just taken it for granted the Flats shouldn't have sewerage and should have the skeptic tank. "Say," says Mis' Toplady, "it don't look to me like we'd have a very hard time knowing what to do with ourselves, now this war is over." "The mornings," says Mame Holcomb, "when we use' to wake up, crazy to start in on something--it looks to me like they ain't all through with yet!" "The meetings," says Mis' Toplady, "when Baptists and Catholics and Elks--" Mis' Sykes was listening. It ain't very often that she comes down off her high horse, but when she does, I tell you she lands hard. "Ladies!" she says. "It was me that was talking about beginning to knit for another war. Why didn't you shut me up and bolt the door?" FOOTNOTE: [2] Copyright, _Good Housekeeping_, June, 1919. THE STORY OF JEFFRO[3] _When I have told this story of Jeffro, the alien, some one has always said:_ "_Yes, but there's another side to that. They aren't all Jeffros._" _When stories are told of American gentleness, childlike faith, sensitiveness to duty, love of freedom, I do not remember to have heard any one rejoin:_ "_Yes, but Americans are not all like that._" _So I wonder why this comment should be made about Jeffro._ I When Jeffro first came knocking at my door that Spring morning, he said that which surprised me more than anything that had been said to me in years. He said: