ke a large wart.

Homeburg was a Mecca of learning and refinement in those days; and then
six of these families pulled out in the same year and moved to Chicago,
where they could soak up a little more culture instead of giving away
all they had. They left a chasm in our midst as big as the Grand Canyon.
It never has been filled--for me at least. I feel, when I wander up that
fine old shady street, past those houses filled with people who are only
as wise as I am, as if I were wandering through the deserted haunts of
an ancient and irreplaceable civilization.

That's the way it goes with us--one bereavement after another. It's
mighty hard to be a mother of sons in Homeburg. I worked in the
post-office for a year once--handed out mail--and I got to know just
exactly what most of the mothers in town wanted. I could please them
with a new magazine and mystify them with a circular or a business
letter. But if I wanted to light them up until they took the shadows out
of the corners as they went out, I would give them a letter from a son,
way off somewhere, making good. The best of them didn't write any too
often. Once a week is pretty regular, I suppose, from the other end; but
you should see the mother begin to come in hungry again the second day
after her letter came. And when a boy came home successful and
prosperous, and his proud mother towed him down Main Street on pretense
of getting him to carry a spool of thread home for her, it used to go
to my heart to see the wistful looks of her women friends. There is
hardly a family in Homeburg of the right age which hasn't a grown-up son
off at war somewhere--fighting failure. It's grand when they win; but I
hate to think of some of our boys who haven't come back.

If it's hard on the mothers, it's even harder on the Homeburg girls.
They say there are one hundred thousand old maids in Massachusetts. I'll
bet that's just about the number of Massachusetts young men who have
gone West or somewhere, and haven't remembered the things they said at
parting as well as the girls did. We've got plenty of girls in Homeburg
who are getting intimately acquainted with the thirties--fine girls,
still pretty, bright, and keeping up with the world. Young men come into
town and do their best to get on a "thou-beside-me" footing, but somehow
the girls don't seem to marry. At the root of almost every case there's
an old Homeburg boy. Maybe he's making good somewhere, and they're both
waiting un