THE PRODIGAL GUEST
Aunt Ellis wrote to me:
“Dear Calliope: Now come and pay me the visit. You’ve never been here since the time I had sciatica and was cross. Come now, and I’ll try to hold my temper and my tongue.”
I wrote back to her:
“I’ll come. I was saving up to buy a new cook-stove next fall, but I’ll bring my cook-stove and come in time for the parade. I did want to see that.”
She answered:
“Mercy, Calliope, I might have known it! You always did love a circus in the village, and these women are certainly making a circus parade of themselves. However, we’ll even drive down to see them do it, if you’ll really come. Now you know how much I want you.”
“I might have known,” I said to myself, “that Aunt Ellis would be like that. The poor thing has had such an easy time that she can’t help it. She thinks what’s been, is.”
She wrote me that she was coming in from the country an hour after my train got there, but that the automobile would be there for me. And I wrote her that I would come down the platform with my umbrella up, so’s her man would know me; and so I done, and he picked me out real ready.
When we got to her big house, that somehow looked so used to being a big house, there was a little boy sitting on the bottom step, half asleep, with a big box.