“Loving-kindness—oh, how great!”
like the whole nice sweep of the river? Well, that was the one she sung. And being it’s a terrible catchy tune, and most of us was brought up on it and has been haunted by it for days together from bed to bed, we all more or less joined in with what little vocal pans we had, and we sung it off and on all the way out.
We was singing it, I recollect, when we come in sight of the Toll Gate House. The Toll Gate House has been there for years, ever since the Tote road got made into a real road, and then it got paid for, and the toll part stopped; and now the City rents the house—there’s a place we always say “City” again—to most anybody, usually somebody poor, with a few chickens and takes in washings and ain’t much of any other claim to being thought of, as claims seem to go.
“Who lives in the Toll Gate House now, I wonder?” says Mis’ Pettibone, breaking off her song.
“Land, nobody,” says Mis’ Lockmeyer; “it’s all fell in on itself—my land,” she says, “the door’s open. Let’s stop and report ’em, so be it’s been tramps.”
So we made Jem Meddledipper stop, and somebody was just going to get out when a woman come to the door.
She was a little woman, with kind of a pindling expression, looking as if she’d started in good and strong, but life had kind of shaved her down till there wasn’t as much left of her, strictly speaking, as’d make a regular person. A person, but not one that looks well and happy the way “person” means to you, when you say the word. She had on a what-had-been navy-blue what-had-been alpaca, but both them attributes had got wore down past the nap. A little girl was standing close beside her—a nice little thing, with her hair sticking up on top like a candle-flame, and tied with a string.
“My land,” says Mis’ Lockmeyer right out, “are you livin’ here?” Mis’ Lockmeyer is like that—she always wears her face inside-out with all the expression showing.
But the woman wasn’t hurt. She smiled a little, and when she smiled I thought she looked real sweet.
“Yes,” she said, “I am. It—it don’t look real like it, does it?”