I was sitting on the steps of the Town Hall, trying to make a willow whistle, when the janitor came along and opened the door. “The Ladies’ Aid are going to have a supper in the downstairs room,” he explained, getting out a broom. I wandered in to visit with him while he swept and dusted the pleasant little community sitting-room where our village social gatherings were held. He moved an armchair and wiped off the frame of the big portrait of Lincoln. “Your great-grandmother gave that, do you know it?” he observed, and then, resting on the broom for a moment and beginning to laugh, “Did you ever hear how Aunt Almera got folks stirred up to do something about this room? Well, ’twas so _like_ her! The place used to be the awfulest hole you ever saw. Years ago they’d used it to lock up drunks in, or anybody that had to be locked up. Then after the new jail was built the sheriff began to take prisoners down there. But nobody did anything to this room to clean it up or fix it. It belongs to the town, you know, and nobody ever’ll do anything that they think they can put off on the town. The women used to talk a lot about it--what a nice place ’twould be for socials, and how ’twould keep the boys off the streets, and how they could have chicken suppers here, same as other towns, if this room was fixed up. But whose business was it to fix it up? The town’s of course! And of course nobody ever thinks that he and his folks are all there is _to_ the town. No, they just jawed about it, and kept saying ‘wa’n’t the selectmen shiftless because they didn’t see to it!’ But of course the selectmen didn’t have the money to do anything. Nothing in the law about using tax money to fix up rooms for sociables, is there? And those were awful tight times, when money came hard and every cent of tax money had to be put to some good plain use. So the selectmen said _they_ couldn’t do anything. And nobody else would, because it wasn’t anybody’s business in particular, and nobody wanted to be put upon and made to do more than his share. And the room got dirtier and dirtier, with the lousy old mattress the last drunk had slept on right there on the floor in the corner, and broken chairs and old wooden boxes, and dust and dry leaves that had blown in through the windows when the panes of glass were broken--regular dumping-ground for trash. “Well, one morning bright and early--I’ve heard my mother tell about it a thousand times--the first person that went by the Town Hall seen the door open and an awful rattling going on. He peeked in, and there was little old Aunt Almera, in a big gingham apron, her white hair sticking out from underneath a towel she’d tied her head up in, cleaning away to beat the band. She looked up, saw him standing and gaping at her, and says, just as though that was what she did every day for a living, ‘Good morning,’ she says. ‘Nice weather, isn’t it?’