We all streamed up the slope, Silas near walking backward most of the way to take in the full magnitude of it. We sat down round the potato salad and the deviled eggs and the veal loaf, beaming. And it made a real nice minute. Oh, and it was no time till we got to living over the old days. And it was no time till Timothy and Eppleby were rolling over, recalling this and bringing back that. It was no time at all till every one of us was back twenty-five to thirty years, and telling about it. And Lucy, that I'd maneuvered should sit by Nick, I caught her looking across at me kind of superior, and as if she could have told me, all the while, that something or other was so! "Let's us drink him a toast," says Timothy Toplady when we got through. "Look-at here: To Nicholas Nordman, the big man of Friendship Village." "Yes, sir!" says Silas Sykes. "And to Nicholas Nordman, that's give us ten thousand dollars _and_ a circus!" "No, sir!" says Eppleby Holcomb, sudden. "None of them things. Let's us drink just to Nick Nordman, that's come back home!" He up with his hand, and it came down on Nick Nordman's shoulder with a sound you could have heard all acrost the grounds. And as he did that, just for a fraction of nothing, Nick Nordman met my eyes. And we both knew what we both knew. Just then the band struck up, and the people were already pouring in the pasture, so we scrabbled things up and all started for the tent. Nick was walking with Lucy. "Lucy," I heard him say, "you look near enough like you used to, for you to be you!" She looked like a girl as she answered him. "You _are_ you, Nick," she says, simple and neat and direct. And me--I walked along, feeling grand. I kind of felt what all of us was feeling, and what everybody was going to feel down there in the big tent, when they knew. But far, far more, I sensed the thing that Nick Nordman, walking there with us, with about a hundred and fifty boys all waiting to sit down side of him at his circus--the thing that Nick Nordman had found out. "God bless you, Calliope," says he, when he got a chance. "Oh!" I says. "He has. He has! He's made folks so awful nice--when they just let it show through!" BEING GOOD TO LETTY[4] "The poor little thing," says I. "Well, mustn't we be good to her?" "Mustn't we?" says Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, wiping her eyes. "Must we not?" says Mis' Silas Sykes--that would correct your grammar if the house was on fire. My niece's daughter Letty had lost her father and her mother within a year, and she was coming to spend the summer with me. "She's going to pick out the style monument she wants here in town," I says, "and maybe buy it." "Poor thing! That'll give her something to put her mind on," says Mis' Sykes.