Mis' Burney pipes up--her that brought up her daughter's
children an' her son-in-law married again an' turned her out:--

"'I use' to think so,' she says quiet; 'the noise o' the children use'
to bother me terrible. When they reely got to goin' I use' to think I
couldn't stand it, my head hurt me so. But now,' s'she, 'I get to
thinkin' sometimes I wouldn't mind a horse-fiddle if some of 'em played
it.'

"'They're lots o' company, the little things,' says old Mis'
Norris--she'd kep' mislayin' her teeth an' the navy-blue lady had took
'em away from her that day for to teach her, so I couldn't hardly
understand what she said. 'Mine was named Ellen an' Nancy,' I made out.

"'Some o' you remember my Sam,'--Mis' Ailing speaks up then, an' she
begun windin' up her yarn an' never noticed she was ravellin' out her
mitten,--'he was an alderman,' she was goin' on, but old Mis' Winslow
cuts in on her:--

"'It don't matter what he was when he was man-grown,' s'she. 'Man-grown
can get along themselves. It's when they're little bits o' ones,' she
says.

"'Little!' says Grandma Holly. 'Is it little you mean? Well, my Amy's
two little feet use' to be swallowed up in my hand--so,' she says,
shuttin' her hand over to show us.

"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 to _feel_ they're so, that's
another thing. And I was feelin' this in my throat 'bout as big as an
orange. I'd thought their hands looked like they'd ought to be tyin' up
little aprons, but I never thought o' the hands bein' rill lonesome to
do the tyin', an' thinkin' about it, too. An' now I understood 'em like
I see 'em for the first time, rill face to face. Somehow, we ain't any
too apt to look at people that way," said Calliope. "You see how I mean
it.

"Then comes the navy-blue woman an' says it's time for their hot milk,
an' they all looked up, kind o' hopeful. An' I see that the navy-blue
one had got 'em trained into the i-dee that hot milk was an event. She
didn't like to hev 'em talk much about the past, she told me, when she
see what we was speakin' of, because it gener'lly made some of 'em cry,
an' the i-dee was to keep the spirit of the home bright an' cheerful.
'So I see,' s'I, dry. An' there was Christmas comin' on, an' nothin' to
break the general cheerfulness but hot milk. "Well," Calliope said, "I
s'pose you'll think