. Cultivation has
modified the soil and the climate, as it modifies human life.

The people seated about under the cottonwoods are much smarter than the
Methodists we used to know. The interior of the new Methodist Church
looks like a theater, with a sloping floor, and as the congregation
proudly say, "opera chairs." The matrons who attend to serving the
refreshments to-night look younger for their years than did the women of
Mrs. Kronborg's time, and the children all look like city children. The
little boys wear "Buster Browns" and the little girls Russian blouses.
The country child, in made-overs and cut-downs, seems to have vanished
from the face of the earth.

At one of the tables, with her Dutch-cut twin boys, sits a fair-haired,
dimpled matron who was once Lily Fisher. Her husband is president of the
new bank, and she "goes East for her summers," a practice which causes
envy and discontent among her neighbors. The twins are well-behaved
children, biddable, meek, neat about their clothes, and always mindful
of the proprieties they have learned at summer hotels. While they are
eating their icecream and trying not to twist the spoon in their mouths,
a little shriek of laughter breaks from an adjacent table. The twins
look up. There sits a spry little old spinster whom they know well. She
has a long chin, a long nose, and she is dressed like a young girl, with
a pink sash and a lace garden hat with pink rosebuds. She is surrounded
by a crowd of boys,--loose and lanky, short and thick,--who are joking
with her roughly, but not unkindly.

"Mamma," one of the twins comes out in a shrill treble, "why is Tillie
Kronborg always talking about a thousand dollars?"

The boys, hearing this question, break into a roar of laughter, the
women titter behind their paper napkins, and even from Tillie there is a
little shriek of appreciation. The observing child's remark had made
every one suddenly realize that Tillie never stopped talking about that
particular sum of money. In the spring, when she went to buy early
strawberries, and was told that they were thirty cents a box, she was
sure to remind the grocer that though her name was Kronborg she didn't
get a thousand dollars a night. In the autumn, when she went to buy her
coal for the winter, she expressed amazement at the price quoted her,
and told the dealer he must have got her mixed up with her niece to
think she could pay such a sum. When she was making her Christmas
prese