"'Ain't he?' says Marne Holcomb. 'Eppleby 'most always has a nut or somethin' in his pocket to give him as he goes by. He takes it like a little squirrel an' like a little gentleman.'
"'He's awful nice when he comes in the shop,' said Abagail. 'He looks at the penny-apiece kind and then buys the two-for-a-cent, so's to give his mother one.'
"'He knows how to behave in a store,' Silas admitted. 'I 'most always give him a coffee-berry, just to see him thank me.'
"'He come into the hotel one day,' says Mis' Hubbelthwait, 'an' stood by me when I was bakin'. I give him a little wad of dough to roll.'
"'I let him drive the 'bus one day, settin' on my knee,' says Jimmy Sturgis. 'He was a nice, careful, complete little cuss.'
"Eppleby Holcomb nodded with his eyes shut.
"'We don't like folks to swing on our front gate,' he says. 'He done it, but he marched right in and told us he'd done it. I give him a doughnut—an' he's kep' right on swingin' an' ownin' up an' eatin' doughnuts.'
"'Even when he chased my chickens,' says Libby Liberty, 'he chased 'em like a little gentleman—towards the coop an' not down the road. I always noticed that about him.'
"'Yes,' says Letty, again, 'he's a dear little soul. What makes us let him die?'
"She said it so calm that it caught even my breath—and my breath, in these things, ain't easy caught. But I got it right back again, and I says:—