And the next day Jeffro walked into the engine house and asked the men sitting round with their heels up how much he owed them. "For what?" says they. "For putting down my fire," Jeffro says. "That is, for coming to put it down if I had one." The men stared at him and burst out laughing. "Why nothing," they said. "That don't cost anything. That's free." Jeffro just stood and looked at them. "Free?" he said. "But the big engine and the wagons and the men and the horses--does nobody pay them to come and put down fires?" "Why, the town does," they told him. "The town pays them." He said eagerly: "No, no--you have not understood. I pay no taxes--I do not help that way with taxes. Then I must pay instead--no?" They could hardly make him understand. All these big things put at his service, even the town fire-bell rung, and nothing to pay for it. His experience with cities was slight, in any case. He went off, looking all dazed, and left the men shouting. It seemed such a joke to the men that it shouldn't be all free. It seemed so wonderful to Jeffro that it should. He hadn't gone half a block from the engine-house when he turned round and went back. "The gentlemen have not understood," he said. "I am not yet a citizen. I have apply for my first papers, but I am not yet a citizen. Whoever is not citizen must pay for this fire attention. Is it not so?" Then they shouted again. Think of stopping to find out whether a man was a citizen before they put his fire out! Everybody in Friendship Village was telling that to each other for weeks, and splitting their sides over it. Less than a couple of weeks afterward Jeffro got a letter from home, from his wife. Postmaster Silas Sykes handed it out to him when Jeffro come in the post-office store for some groceries, and when he started to pay for the groceries Jeffro says: "How much on the letter?" "Why, they's nothing due on that," says Silas, squinting at it over the sugar-barrel. "But thes' is only old country stamp on here," said Jeffro. "It is not enough for all this way in America too?" Silas waved his hand at him like the representative of the gover'ment he was. "Your Uncle Sam pays for all that," says he. Jeffro looks at him a minute, then he says: "Uncle Sam--is that, then, a person? I see the pictures--" "Sure, sure," says Silas, winking to Timothy Toplady that stood by. "Uncle Sam takes grand care of us, you bet." "I am not yet a citizen," Jeffro insisted. "I have apply for my first papers--" "Go 'long," says Silas, magnificent. "Do you s'pose Uncle Sam bothers himself about that? You belong to his family as soon as you strike shore." Timothy Toplady told me about it. "And," says he, "do you know that man went out of the store looking perfectly queer! And kind of solemn."