"Madam, if you have a house for rent--a house for rent. Have you?" For years nobody had said that to me; and the little house which I own on the Red Barns road, not far from the schoolhouse, was falling in pieces because I never could get enough ahead to mend it up. In the road in front of it there was a big hole that had never been filled in. And the house only had two rooms anyway--and a piece of ground about as big as a rug; and the house was pretty near as old as the ground was. "Land," I says, "man, you don't want to rent that house?" He smiled, nice and wrinkled and gentle, and said yes, he did; and nothing that I, as my own real estate agent, could say discouraged him. Even when I'd whipped off my kitchen apron and found the key to the little house in my button-box, and had gone down the road with him to look the house over, and let him see what it was like, he insisted that he wanted to rent it. And so in the end he done: at four dollars a month, which wasn't much more than, by rights, the sale price should have been. "I do little things to this house," said Jeffro. "I make little change for good. I have some handy with a hammer." I remember turning back a ways from the house, and seeing him standing there, with his hands behind him, looking at the house as if it _was_ something, and something of his. When I got home and was up in the garret hunting up the three green paper shades for his windows, it come to me that I hadn't asked him for any references, and that for all I knew he might be going to counterfeit money or whisky or something there on the premises. But anybody'd known better than that just to look at Jeffro's face. A wonderful surprised face he had; surprised, but believing it all too, and trusting the good. A brown face, with big, brown eyes, and that wrinkled smile of his. I like to think about him. After a few days I went over with the shades, and he'd got a few pieces of furniture there, setting round, loose and unattached. And on a big basket of stuff was sitting a little boy, about eight years old. "That's Joseph," says Jeffro, simple. "We are the two that came." Then he told me. In "the old country" his wife and two little ones were waiting till he could earn money to send back for them. "I thought when I had thes' little follow here," he said, "I could work then more easy. He don't eat but little," he added. "But how," says I, "are you expecting to earn all that money out of Friendship Village--where folks saves for years to put on a new stoop?" At this he smiled, sort of knowing. And he pointed to a poster over his wood-box. It was printed in Yiddish, all but the words "United States"; but the picture--that was plain enough. It showed a mill on one side of the street, and a bank on the other. And from the mill a stream of workingmen, with bags of money on their backs, were streaming over toward the bank.