you can't set home. An' then
she says slow--an' you could 'a' knocked me over while I listened:--

"'I've been thinkin',' she says, 'that we ought to go up to Oldmoxon
house an see that sick person.'

"'Calliope!' I says, 'for the land. You don't want to be refused in!'

"'I don't know as I do an' I don't know but I do,' she answers me. 'I
feel like I wanted to be doin' somethin'.'

"With that she out in the kitchen an' begins to fill a basket.
Calliope's music didn't prevent her cookin' good, as it does some. She
put in I don't know what all good, an' she had me pick some hollyhocks
to take along. An' before I knew it, I was out on Daphne Street in the
moonlight headin' for Oldmoxon house here that no foot in Friendship had
stepped or set inside of in 'most six months.

"'They won't let us in,' I says, pos'tive.

"'Well,' Calliope says, 'seems though I'd like to walk up there a night
like this, anyway.'

"An' I wasn't the one to stop her, bein' I sort o' guessed that what
started her off was the New People. Those two livin' so near by--lookin'
forward to what they was lookin' forward to--so soon after the boy had
come to Calliope, an' all, had took hold of her terrible. She'd spent
hours handmakin' the little baby-bonnet she was goin' to give 'em. An'
then mebbe it was the night some, too, that made her want to come up
around this house--because you could 'most 'a' cut the moonlight with a
knife.

"They wa'n't any light in the big hall here when we rung the bell, but
they lit up an' let us in. Yes, they actually let us in. Mis' Morgan
come to the door herself.

"'Come right in,' she says, cordial. 'Come right upstairs.'

"Calliope says somethin' about our bein' glad they could see us.

"'Oh,' says Mis' Morgan, 'I had orders quite a while ago to let in
whoever asked. An' you're the first,' she says. 'You're the first.'

"An' then it come to us that this Mis' Morgan we'd all been tryin' to
call on was only what you might name the housekeeper. An' so it turned
out she was.

"The whole upper hall was dark, like puttin' a black skirt on over your
head. But the room we went in was cheerful, with a fire burnin' up. Only
it was awful littered up--old newspapers layin' round, used glasses
settin' here an' there, water-pitcher empty, an' the lamp-chimney was
smoked up, even. The woman said somethin' about us an' went out an' left
us with somebody settin' in a big chair by the fire, sick an' wrapped
up. An' when