Friendship Village

"I went back to Mis' Loneway, an' I guess I lied some. I said the kid was sick--had the croup, I thought, an' she'd hev to wait. Her face fell, but she said 'all right an' pleas...

"'I did play,' he says to her--he had a nice little way o' pressin' down hard with his voice on one word an' lettin' the next run off his tongue--'I did play dreams,' I rec'lect...

"Well, we walked down the road together, like it had always been that way. An' we talked--like you do when you're with them you'd rather be with than anybody else. An' he ask' m...

I gave my attention to them all: The pop-corn wagon, an aristocratic affair that looked like a hearse; the little painted canaries and love-birds, so out of place and patient th...

We went downstairs, and Miss Clementina rejoined her mother and the lawyer in the library, and Delia and Abel were left alone together in the firelight. If I had been a dream, a...

"I'll never forget when 'Leven come out o' that room, after she'd got through. We all went in--Mis' Crapwell an' Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb an' I, an' some more. An' I took '...

"'Oh, I donno,' s'she. 'I'd like to go an' I'd like to ride to the graveyard. I've watched the funerals through the poorhouse fence. An' I'd kind o' like to be one o' the follow...

At eleven o'clock that night, as I sat writing a letter in which the spirit of what had come to pass must have breathed--as a spirit will breathe--Calliope Marsh tapped at my do...

"Well, so they went on. I give you my word I stood there sort o' grippin' up on my elbows. I'd always known it was so--like you do know things are so. But somehow when you come...

When Nita and Viola and I reached Proudfit House, the guests were all assembled, but we knew that Mrs. Proudfit and Miss Clementina would be the first to forgive us when they un...

The night was one clinging to the way of Autumn, and as yet with no Winter hinting. The air was mild and dry, and the sky was starry. I am not ashamed that on a quiet highroad o...

"I never see anybody more het up. We all tried to tell him. Nobody in Friendship has a warm spare room in winter, without it's the Proudfits, an' they was in Europe an' their ho...

"I _know_ it was her that Peleg meant about," she said. "I thought of it first when he said about her looks--an' her husband a clerk--an' he said he called her Linda. An' then w...

"Don't you be shocked at her," Calliope warned me, as we closed Mis' Holcomb's gate behind us; "she's dreadful diff'r'nt an' bitter since Abigail was married last month. She's g...

So I filled a tray with all the dainties of our little feast, and my maid carried it to her where she sat, and then to us at table served dessert. And my strange party went forw...

The Topladys and others of us who united to uphold Emerel, and especially to uphold Emerel's mother, could not but realize that the majority of Friendship society had regretted...

Friendship Village is not known to me, nor are any of its people, save in the comradeship which I offer here. But I commend for occupancy a sweeter place. For us here the long C...

"Well," she added, "they's somethin' else. It's somethin' almost like what you've got--you two--an' like what Delia an' Abel have got. Lately, I don't _need_ to hear the Bell an...