An' land knows, it needs some smoothin' out for me."

With this I remember that it was as if my own loneliness spoke for me.
At my reply Calliope looked at me quickly--as if I, too, had opened a
door.

"Sometimes Thanksgivin' _is_ some like seein' the sun shine when you're
feelin' rill rainy yourself," she said thoughtfully.

She held out her blue-mittened hand and let the flakes fall on it in
stars and coronets.

"I wonder," she asked evenly, "if you'd help me get up a Thanksgivin'
dinner for a few poor sick folks here in Friendship?"

In order to keep my self-respect, I recall that I was as ungracious as
possible. I think I said that the day meant so little to me that I was
willing to do anything to avoid spending it alone. A statement which
seems to me now not to bristle with logic.

"That's nice of you," Calliope replied genially. Then she hesitated,
looking down Daphne Street, which the Plank Road had become, toward
certain white houses. There were the homes of Mis' Mayor Uppers, Mis'
Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and the Liberty sisters,--all substantial
dignified houses, typical of the simple prosperity of the countryside.

"The only trouble," she added simply, "is that in Friendship I don't
know of a soul rill sick, nor a soul what you might call poor."

At this I laughed, unwillingly enough. Dear Calliope! Here indeed was a
drawback to her project.

"Honestly," she said reflectively, "Friendship can't seem to do anything
like any other town. When the new minister come here, he give out he was
goin' to do settlement work. An' his second week in the place he come to
me with a reg'lar hang-dog look. 'What kind of a town is this?' he says
to me, disgusted. 'They ain't nobody sick in it an' they ain't nobody
poor!' I guess he could 'a' got along without the poor--most of us can.
But we mostly like to hev a few sick to carry the flowers off our house
plants to, an' now an' then a tumbler o' jell. An' yet I've known weeks
at a time when they wasn't a soul rill flat down sick in Friendship.
It's so now. An' that's hard, when you're young an' enthusiastic, like
the minister."

"But where are you going to find your guests then, Calliope?" I asked
curiously.

"Well," she said brightly, "I was just plannin' as you come up with me.
An' I says to myself: 'God give me to live in a little bit of a place
where we've all got enough to get along on, an' Thanksgivin' finds us
all in health. It looks like He'd afflicte