Friendship Village

Friendship Village is not known to me, nor are any of its people, save in the comradeship which I offer here. But I commend for occupancy a sweeter place. For us here the long Caledonia hills, the four rhythmic spans of the bridge, the nearer river, the island where the first birds build—these teach our windows the quiet and the opportunity of the home town, among the home people. To those who have such a bond to cherish I commend the little real home towns, their kindly, brooding companionship, their doors to an efficiency as intimate as that of fairy fingers. If there were shrines to these things, we would seek them. The urgency is to recognize shrines.
Portage, Wisconsin,
September, 1908.
Certain of the following chapters have appeared in The Outlook, The Broadway Magazine, The Delineator, Everybody's, and Harper's Monthly Magazine . Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous permission to reprint these chapters.
It is as if Friendship Village were to say:—
There is no help for it. A telephone line, antique oak chairs, kitchen cabinets, a new doctor, and the like are upon us. But we shall be mediæval directly—we and our improvements. Really, we are so now, if you know how to look.
And are we not so? We are one long street, rambling from sun to sun, inheriting traits of the parent country roads which we unite. And we are cross streets, members of the same family, properly imitative, proving our ancestorship in a primeval genius for trees, or bursting out in inexplicable weaknesses of Court-House, Engine-House, Town Hall, and Telephone Office. Ultimately our stock dwindles out in a slaughter-yard and a few detached houses of milkmen. The cemetery is delicately put behind us, under a hill. There is nothing mediæval in all this, one would say. But then see how we wear our rue:—
When one of us telephones, she will scrupulously ask for the number, not the name, for it says so at the top of every page. Give me one-one, she will put it, with an impersonality as fine as if she were calling for four figures. And Central will answer:—