All of a sudden Jeffro turned his back to me and walked a few steps away. "A garden?" he says, not looking round. "A little garden?" "Kind of a one," I told him. "Such as it is, it's all right--what there is of it. And Abigail Arnold," I says, "wants you should make her another wooden bridal pair for the cake in the window--the groom to the other one is all specked up. And I heard her say you could set some of your toys there in her front case. Oh yes, and Mis' Timothy Toplady's got a clucking hen she's been trying to hold back for you, and she says you can pay her in eggs--" I stopped, because Jeffro frightened me. He wheeled round and stood looking out the door across the pasture opposite, and his lips were moving. I thought maybe he was figuring something with them, and I kept still. But he wasn't--he was thinking with them. In a minute he straightened up. And his face--it wasn't brave or confident the way it had been once, but it was saying a thing for him--a nice thing, even before he spoke. He came and put out his hand to me, round Joseph. "My friend," he says, "I vill tell you what it is. Thes' is what I thought America was like." Wasn't that queer, when I understood all he had hoped from America, and all he hadn't found? A lump come in my throat--not a sad one though! But a glad one. And oh, the difference in them lumps! He went back to work at his toys again, and he began at the bottom, a whole year after his first coming, to save up money to bring over his wife and the little ones. And it wasn't two weeks later that I went there one night and saw him out working on the hole in the road again. "I work for you this time, though," he said, when he see I noticed. "Thes' I do not for America--no! I do it for you and for thes' village. No one else." And I thought, while I watched him pounding away at the dirt: "Anybody might think Friendship Village knows things America hasn't found out yet--but of course that can't be so." FOOTNOTE: [3] Copyright, _Everybody's Magazine_, 1915. WHEN NICK NORDMAN CAME BACK HOME I was awful nervous about going up to meet Nick Nordman. It had been near thirty years since I'd seen him, and he'd got so rich that one house and one automobile weren't anything. He had about three of each, and he frisked the world in between occupying them. Still, when he wrote to me that he was coming back to visit the village, I made up my mind that I'd be there to welcome him, being as we were boys and girls in school together.