hard with
bearing trees, good barn and milch cow, cement walks and watertight
cellar. And he will sell that place at a sacrifice, which he can well
afford, and go off to the city, where he will learn to wear a fur-lined
coat, kick about the financial legislation and visit us on Christmas Day
once per decade.

I sometimes wonder what Homeburg would be like if all her bright boys
and girls should come back. Don't suppose the town could hold them at
all. It would be stretched out of shape in a week. But it would be a
glorious place to live in, and wouldn't we shine in art and music and
politics and finance--to say nothing of baseball! Suppose we had Forrest
Brady back home, catching for the Homeburg team! He gets seven thousand
dollars a year from Boston now; but I remember when he helped put dents
in Paynesville baseball pride for nothing, and would pay some youngster
a quarter to hustle baggage at the depot in his absence. And suppose the
Congregational choir still had Mary Saunders! Why, we could charge a
dollar a seat for ordinary services, and people would come down from
Chicago to attend! When I think what she gets for one concert now, and
then think how long the Ladies' Aid Society has been working to paint
the church and haven't made it yet, it makes me wish we could put
Homeburg on wheels and haul it after some of our distinguished children.
And what if we had Alex McQuinn to write up the _Democrat_ again? Every
month we almost ruin ourselves at home buying all the magazines he
writes for; but when he was a fat young thing in spectacles hunting
locals and trying to write funny things for the _Democrat_, he wasn't
appreciated at all. Old Judge Hicks, who had no sense of humor, chased
him several miles once for telling how he tried to stop the 4:11 train
by yelling "Whoa" at it. And Editor Ayers had to fire Alex to keep the
peace.

When Rollin Derby, who draws pictures for your New York paper, went to
school, he could climb a tree by digging his bare toes into the rough
bark, but was not otherwise distinguished. When Maurice Gadby was a boy
in Homeburg, he went barefooted in summer with the rest of us, and who
could have guessed that he would grow up to give tango teas for your
four hundred and only allow the better quality of them to pay him
twenty-five dollars per cup at that? But the career that amuses me most
is Jack Nixon--"Shinner" Nixon, we used to call him. He commands a
battleship for a living now; and Ho