diculed as a childish thing by the great minds that foregather at
Uncle Tony's.

But Grandma Wentworth remarked one Saturday afternoon, right in the
heart of town too, when Main Street was so crowded that everything that
was said aloud would be told and retold at church the next moraine and
repeated through the countryside the week following,--pointing to Joe,
Dick and John who all three happened to be going to the bank for
change,--"There go Green Valley's three good little men. And that
makes me think. I have another letter from Nanny Ainslee from Italy
enclosing foreign stamps for John."

Now until then nobody knew that John Gans was collecting stamps. But
that's Grandma Wentworth. She always knows things about people that
nobody else knows. And when any Green Valley folks go a-traveling they
sooner or later write to Grandma Wentworth. Sooner or later they get
homesick for Green Valley and they write for news to the one person
who, they know, will not fail to answer.

Of course some of them, like Jamie Danby, get into trouble. Jamie ran
away from home with a third-rate show. The show got stranded somewhere
in the western desert and Jamie wanted to come home. He knew that his
mother would be glad to see him but he wasn't at all sure of his
father. So he wrote to Grandma Wentworth, begging her to fix things
up. And she did.

And there was Tommy Dudley who went away home-steading somewhere out
West and who writes regularly to Grandma Wentworth in this fashion:

". . . for heaven's sake send me your baking-powder biscuit recipe and
how do you make buckwheat pancakes, and send me all kinds of vegetable
seeds and what's good for chicken lice and a sore throat, and tell
Carrie Bailey I ain't forgot her and that as soon as I've got things
going half-way straight here I'll come back and get her. Just now the
dog, the mules and chickens and a family of mice and I are all living
peacefully together in the one room but we're awful healthy if a good
appetite is any kind of a sign. I can't write to Carrie because her
folks open all her letters and they'd nag her into marrying that old
knock-kneed, squint-eyed, fat-necked son-of-a-gun of an Andrew Langly,
if they thought she was having anything to do with a worthless heathen
cuss like me. And say, Grandma, throw in some of your flower seeds,
those right out of your own garden, you know, the tall ones along the
fence and the little ones with the blue eyes and the