For instance, Mis' Fire Chief Merriman was booked to represent a Jugo-Slav. None of us ladies knew how it ought to be done, so we had fixed up kind of a neutral costume of red, white and blue that couldn't be so very far out of the way. But the last minute Mis' Merriman got nervous for fear there'd be a Jugo-Slav in the audience, and she balked out on going on, and it took all we could do to persuade her. And then the Balkans got nervous--we weren't any of us real clear about the Balkans. And we didn't know whether the Dolomites was states or mountains, so we left them out altogether. But we'd been bound the little nations were going to be represented whether anybody else was or not--and there we were, nations of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, the Americas and the provinces, and somebody for every one of them. And for a curtain we'd sewed all the flags of every nation together because we were so sick and tired of the advertisements and the pink lady on the old Opera House curtain. It's no part of my purpose, as the orators say, to tell about the Friendship Village "Feast of Nations" entire. It would take sheets. To mention the mere mistakes and misadventures of that evening would be Arabian Nights long. Us ladies were the nations, and the young girls were the spirits--Liberty, Democracy, To-morrow, Humanity, Raw Materials, Trade Routes, the High Seas, Disputed Territory, Commerce, Peace, and like that. There ought to have been one more, and she did come all dressed up and ready, in white with gold and silver on her; and then she sat flat down on a scaffold, and she says: "I _can_ not do it. I _can_ not pronounce me. I shall get," she says wild, "nothing said out loud but a whisper. And what _is_ the use?" We gathered round her, and we understood. None of us could pronounce her easy, especially when scared. She was Reciprocity. "Make a sign," says somebody, "make a sign with her name on it, and hold it over her head." But that was no better, because nobody could spell her, either, including her herself. So we give it up, and she went down in the audience and looked on. "It's all right," says Mis' Sykes. "Nobody knows what it means, anyway." "No," says I, "but think of the work her mother's put on her dress." And we all knew what that meant, anyway; and we all felt bad, and thought mebbe the word would be more in use by the next show we give, if any. About in the middle of the program, just after Commerce and Raw Materials and Disputed Territory tried to raise a row, and had got held in place by Humanity, Mis' Sykes came to me behind the scenes. She was Columbia, of course, and she was dressed in the United States flag, and she carried an armful of all the other flags. We had had all we could do to keep her from wearing a crown--she'd been bound and determined to wear a crown, though we explained to her that crowns was going out of fashion and getting to be very little worn. "But they're so regal!" she kept saying, grieving.