"That was put up on my cow-shed at home," said Jeffro. "I have brought it. But I have no trade--I can not earn money fast like those. I make the toys." He threw open the door into the only other room of the house. In it was piled dozens of boxes, and some broad shelves to be put up, and a table was covered with colored stuff. "Then I go up to the city and sell," said he. "It is only five miles. But I can not live there--not with thes' boy. I say, 'I vill find some little cheap place out in the country for us two.' So then I come here. I am now in America five weeks," he added, proud. "Five weeks!" says I. "Then where'd you learn to talk American?" "I have study and save' for six-seven years, to be ready," said Jeffro, simple. "Now I come. Next year I think I send for them." All day long those words of his kept coming and ringing in my ears. And it kind of seemed to me that in them was a great chorus--a chorus of thousands going up that minute, and this minute, and all the time, all over America: "Now I come. Next year I think I send for them." And I says to myself: "What's America going to do for him? What's America going to do to him? What are we going to do to him? And what is he going to do for us?" Well, the story of the first few weeks of Jeffro's in Friendship Village is for me a kind of window set in the side-wall of the way things are. One morning, a little before nine o'clock, I had to go to the schoolhouse to see Miss Mayhew. When I went by Jeffro's I didn't see anything of him, but when I got along by the schoolhouse grounds, there I saw him, leaning on the fence under the locust-tree. "Good morning, Mr. Jeffro," I says. "Do the children bother you down to your house with their noise? That's one reason my house used to be so hard to rent, it was so close by the schoolhouse." His face, when he turned to me, startled me. "Bother me!" he said, slow. "Every day I come across to look at them near. To see them--it is a vonder. Thes' big building, thes' big yard, thes' children that do no vork, only learn, learn. And see--Joseph is there. Over by the swing--you see him? He learn, too--my Joseph--I do not even buy his books. It is free--all free. I am always vatching them in thes' place. It is a vonder." Then one night, when he had been there about two weeks, Jeffro's house caught fire. A candle that he used for melting his wax tipped over on his toy shavings and blazed up. Timothy Toplady, driving by, heard him shout, and galloped into town for the department, and they went tearing out Red Barns way soon after Jeffro had the fire put out. He was making toys again when the fire-engine drew up at his gate, and the men came trampling up to his porch, wanting the blaze pointed out to them. Bud Miles, that's in the department, told me how Jeffro stood in the door bowing to them and regretting the trouble he'd made, and apologizing to them for not having any fire ready for them to put out.