til he does. Maybe he isn't making good and is too proud to
ask her to wait. Maybe she's waiting alone--because some other girl was
handier in the new place. And maybe it wasn't a case of wait at all,
only the boy who went away looked better to some Homeburg girl than any
of those who stayed at home. That was the case with Sam Flanburg and
Minnie Briggs a few years ago.

Sam is on the Chicago Board of Trade and is one of our old-time boys.
Two years ago he came back, roaringly prosperous, to visit for the first
time since he had left, and pretty suddenly he discovered to his
amazement that on packing up ten years before he'd left a pearl of great
price behind, said pearl being Minnie. In other words he fell in love
over his ears with her, and Minnie, who was one of our very nicest
girls, with a disposition like triple distilled extract of charity,
treated him like a dog. He stayed around for a month cluttering up the
Briggs's front porch day and night, while Minnie put up an imitation of
haughty indifference and careless frivolity which was as good as a show
for every one in town except Sam, who couldn't see through it. That's
one of our small town assets--you get to look on at most of the love
affairs. We watched Minnie and Sam with our hearts in our mouths for
fear she'd carry it too far and lose him, for every one had it straight
from Mary Askinson, who is intimately acquainted with a close friend of
Minnie's old school chum, that Minnie had been in love with Sam since
they graduated from the high school together. It was all we could do
from breaking in and interfering, especially when Sam went off his feed
and began to throw out ugly talk about going to the Philippines or some
place where fever can be gotten cheap. But one morning Sam came
down-town, and the first man who saw his face called up his wife and
told her the good news. Talk about extra editions for distributing news!
Before a city paper could have gotten an extra on the street, five
intimate friends of Minnie's had dropped in casually to see her, and
when they saw her face, of course they fell on her neck. Sam told Chet
Frazier next day that it made him so mad to think he'd lived twenty
years in the same town with Minnie and had never appreciated his
blessings that he felt like climbing Pikes Peak and kicking himself off.

There's Mary Smith. She's our prize old maid and dresses like a mail
sack full of government seeds, but they say she was the pretties