Acceptances to the Home-coming kept flowing in like mad—all the folks we’d most wanted to come was a-coming, them and their families. I begun to get warm all through me, and to go round singing, and to wake up feeling something grand was going to happen and, when I was busy, to know there was something nice, just over the edge of my job, sitting there rosy, waiting to be thought about. It worked on us all that way. It was a good deal like being in love. I donno but it was being in love. In love with folks.
The afternoon before the Home-coming was to begin, there was to be a rehearsal of the Children’s Drill, that Mis’ Sykes had charge of for the opening night. We were all on the Market Square, working like beavers and like trojums, or whatever them other busy animals are, getting the booths set up. All the new things that the town had got and done in the last fifty years was represented, each in a booth, all round the Square.... And in the middle of the Square stood the great big Cedar-of-Lebanon tree that we’d used last Christmas for the first annual Friendship Village outdoors Christmas tree. I wondered how anybody could ever have said that it was in the way! It stood there, all still, and looking like it knew us far, far better than we knew it—the way a tree does. With the wind blowing through it gentle, it made a wonderful nice center-piece, I thought.
We’d just got to tacking on to Eppleby Holcomb’s red Department Emporium booth when we heard a shout, and there, racing along the street, come the forty-fifty children that was going to be in the Children’s Drill. They all come pounding and scampering over to where we were, each with a little paper stick in their hand for the wand part, and they swarmed up to Mis’ Sykes that was showing ’em how, and they shouted:
“Mis’ Sykes! Mis’ Sykes! Can’t we rehearse now?”—for “rehearse” seems to be a word that children just loves by natural instinct same as “cave” and “den” and “secret stairway.”
I looked down in the faces all pink and eager and happy—I knew most of ’em by name. I’d be ashamed to live in a town where I didn’t know anyway fifty-sixty children by name, keeping up as fast as necessary. And with ’em I see was Lisbeth’s little boy, waving a stick of kindling for his wand, happy as a clam, but not a mum clam at all.
“Hello, Chris!” I says. “I didn’t know you could drill.”
But he stopped jumping and laughing. “I can’t,” he says, “I was just pe-tend. I can pe-tend, can’t I?” he says, looking up alarmed.
“Hush, Calliope!” says Mis’ Sykes, back of me. “No need making it any harder for him than ’tis.”
“What do you mean by that?” I ask’ her sharp.