All these things begun to open my eyes. Here, all my life, I'd been taking things for granted. My school-days, the fire-engine, postage-stamps, and all the rest, I'd took for granted, just like this generation is taking for granted aëroplanes. And all of a sudden now, I see how they were: not gifts to me, but powers of the big land. I'd always thought of a village as a person. But a Big Land--that had powers too! And was developing more as fast as its folks would let it. And it was wonderful consoling. It helped me over more than I can tell. When Silas Sykes give light measure on my sugar and oatmeal, thinks I: "Well, you're just a little piece of the Big Land's power of business--and it ain't grown yet. It's only just growing." And when the Friendship Village Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality--that's just the name of it and it works at more things than just cemetery--when it had spent five years studying our gover'ment, and then turned around and created an executive board whose reports to the Society of Forty had to be made unanimous--I says to myself: "Well, the club's just a little piece of the Big Land's power of democracy, and it ain't grown yet. It's only just growing." And when the Friendship Village chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to leave us ladies borrow their copy of the American flag because they reverenced it so hard they were afraid it would get tore, I says to myself: "But it's just a little scrap of the Big Land's power of patriotism to the universe, and it ain't grown yet only just to one country--and not entirely to that." And it made me see things intimate and tender. And it was Jeffro that did that for me. That summer he come to kind of belong to the town, the way a hill or a tree does, only lots more so. At first, folks used to call him "that Jew peddler," and circus day I heard Mis' Sykes saying we better lock up our doors during the parade, because we didn't know what "that foreigner" might take it in his head to do. "Mis' Sykes," says I, "where were your mother and father born?" "New York state," says she, like the right answer. "And their folks?" I went on. "Massachusetts," says she, like she was going to the head now sure. "And _their_ folks?" I continued, smooth. "Where'd _they_ come from?" Mis' Sykes began to wobble. "Well," says she, "there was three brothers come over together--" "Yes," I says, "I know. There always is. Well, where'd they come from? And where'd their folks come from? Were they immigrants to America, too? Or did they just stay foreigners in England or Germany or Scandinavia or Russia, maybe?" says I. "Which was it?" Mis' Sykes put on her most ancestral look. "You can ask the most personal questions, Calliope," she began.