do for. Since the
Cadozas went, we ain't known which way to look for poor. Mis' Ricker
gettin' her fortune so puts her beyond the wolf. An' Peleg Bemus, you
can't _get_ him to take anything. No, I don't know of anybody real
decently poor."

"An' nobody sick?" Calliope pressed her wistfully.

"Well, there's Mis' Crawford," admitted Mis' Uppers; "she had a spell o'
lumbago two weeks ago, but I see her pass the house to-day. Mis' Brady
was laid up with toothache, too, but the _Daily_ last night said she'd
had it out. An' Mis' Doctor Helman did have one o' her stomach attacks
this week, an' Elzabella got out her dyin' dishes an' her dyin' linen
from the still-room--you know how Mis' Doctor always brings out her nice
things when she's sick, so't if she should die an' the neighbours come
in, it'd all be shipshape. But she got better this time an' helped put
'em back. I declare it's hard to get up anything in the charity line
here."

Calliope sat smiling a little, and I knew that it was because of her
secret certainty that "some o' the hunger" would come her way, to be
fed.

"I can't help thinkin'," she said quietly, "that we'll find somebody.
An' I tell you what: if we do, can I count on you to help some?"

Mis' Mayor Uppers flushed with quick pleasure.

"Me, Calliope?" she said. And I remembered that they had told me how the
Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality had been unable
to tempt Mis' Uppers to a single meeting since the mayor ran away. "Oh,
but I couldn't though," she said wistfully.

"No need to go to the table if you don't want," Calliope told her. "Just
bake up somethin' for us an' bring it over. Make a couple o' your cherry
pies--did you get hold of any cherries to put up this year? Well, a
couple o' your cherry pies an' a batch o' your nice drop sponge cakes,"
she directed. "Could you?"

Mis' Mayor Uppers looked up with a kind of light in her eyes.

"Why, yes," she said, "I could, I guess. I'll bake 'em Thanksgivin'
mornin'. I--I was wonderin' how I'd put in the day."

When we stepped out in the snow again, Calliope's face was shining.
Sometimes now, when my faith is weak in any good thing, I remember her
look that November morning. But all that I thought then was how I was
being entertained that lonely day.

The dear Liberty sisters were next, Lucy and Viny and Libbie Liberty. We
went to the side door,--there were houses in Friendship whose front
doors we tacitly understood that