Ruby lapses back into her vacant stare and sort of shivers. "It's so big and--and whirly!" says she. "I don't like things to be whirly. Then the people are so strange, and their faces so hard. If--if I should fall down in one of those crowds, I'm sure they would walk right over me, trample on me, without caring." "Pooh!" says I. "You'll work up a rush-hour nerve in a month or so. Of course, havin' always lived in a place like Naukeesha----" "But I haven't," corrects Ruby. "I was born in Kansas." "As bad as that!" says I. "And your folks moved up there later, eh?" "No," says she. "They--they--I lost them there. A cyclone, you know." "You don't mean," says I, "that--that----" "Yes," says she, "Mother, Father, and my two brothers. We were all together when it struck; that is, I was just coming in from the kitchen. I'd been shutting the windows. I saw them all go--whirled off, just like that. The chimney fell, big beams came down, then it was all smoky and dark. I must have been blown through a window. My face was cut a little. I never knew. Neighbors found me in a field by a stump. They found the others too--laid them side by side in the wagon shed. Nothing else was left standing. It's dreadful, being in a cyclone--the roar, you know, and things coming at you in the dark, and that feeling of being lifted and whirled. I was only twelve; but I--I can't forget. And when I'm in big, noisy places it all comes back. I suppose I'm silly." Was she? Say, what's your guess about that? And, take it from me, I didn't wonder any more at that stary look of hers. She'd seen 'em all go--four of 'em. Good-night! I talked easy and soothin' to Ruby after that. "Then I went up to live with Uncle Edward at Naukeesha," she trails along. "He's a minister there. It was he who suggested my going into foreign mission work. I had to do something, you know, and I'd always been such a good scholar. I love books. So I studied hard, and was sent to the Co-ed. But the languages took so much time. Then I had to skip several terms and work to help pay my expenses. I worked during vacations too, at anything. Now I'm waiting for a field. They send you out when there's a vacancy." "How about Nelson?" says I. "He's goin' to be a missionary too?" "He doesn't want me to go," says Ruby, shakin' her head. "That is why he came on. He had charge of the electric light plant too, a good place. And here he gets only odd jobs. I tell him he's silly to stay. I can't see why he does." "Asked him, have you?" says I. "Why, no," says Ruby. "Shoot it at him to-night," says I. But she shakes her head, opens her notebook, and feeds in a copyin' sheet as the clock points to 1. I looks up just in time to catch a couple of them cheap bondroom sports nudgin' each other as they passes by. Thought I'd been joshin' the Standin' Joke, I expect. Well, that's the way I started in, I'll admit.