nless
you knew his pet cats. You admire that calm and imperturbable
dignity, that sphinxlike and yet vigilant poise of bearing which has
made Judge Mayne so notable an ornament of the bench? It is purely
feline: "He caught it from his cats, suh: he caught every God-blessed
bit of it from his cats!"

As one may perceive, we have delicious neighbors!

When we had been settled in Appleboro a little more than a year, and I
had gotten the parish wheels running fairly smooth, we discovered that
by my mother's French house-keeping, that exquisitely careful
house-keeping which uses everything and wastes nothing, my salary was
going to be quite sufficient to cover our modest menage, thus leaving
my mother's own income practically intact. We could use it in the
parish; but there was so much to be done for that parish that we were
rather at a loss where to begin, or what one thing to accomplish among
so many things crying aloud. But finally, tackling what seemed to us
the worst of these crying evils, we were able to turn the two empty
rooms upstairs into what Madame pleasantly called Guest Rooms, thus
remedying, to the best of our ability, the absolute lack of any
accommodation for the sick and injured poor. And as time passed, these
Guest Rooms, so greatly needed, proved not how much but how little we
could do. We could only afford to maintain two beds on our small
allowance, for they had to be absolutely free, to help those for whom
they were intended--poor folks in immediate and dire need, for whom
the town had no other place except an insanitary room in the jail. You
could be born and baptized in the Guest Rooms, or shriven and sent
thence in hope. More often you were coaxed back to health under my
mother's nursing and Clelie's cooking and the skill of Doctor Walter
Westmoreland.

No bill ever came to the Parish House from Dr. Walter Westmoreland,
whom my poor people look upon as a direct act of Providence in their
behalf. He is an enormous man, big and ruddy and baldheaded and
clean-shaven, with the shoulders of a coal-heaver and legs like a pair
of twin oaks. He is rather absent-minded, but he never forgets the
down-and-out Guest Roomers, and he has a genius for remembering the
mill-children. These are his dear and special charge.

Westmoreland is a great doctor who chooses to live in a small town; he
says you can save as many lives in a little town as a big one, and
folks need you more. He is a socialist who looks upon