Beyond the trees north of the pasture it lay, with little lifts of smoke curling up from folks’s cook-stoves. There was a look to it of breakfasts a-getting and stores being opened and the day rousting up. Right while we looked, the big, bass seven o’clock whistle blew over to the round-house, and the little peepy one chimed in up at the brick-yard, and I could hear the town clock in the engine-house striking, kind of old-fashioned and sweet-toned. And all around the country lay quiet-seeming, down to the flats and out acrost the tracks and clear to the city limits that we couldn’t see, where the life of the little fields was going on. And in that nice, cozy, seven-o’clock minute I see it all as I do sometimes, almost like a person sitting there, with its face turned towards me, expectant, waiting to see what I’m going to do for it.
“Jove,” says the man, “look at it! Look at it. It looks like the family sitting down to breakfast.”
I glanced up at him quick. Not many sees villages that way. The most sees them like cats asleep in the sun. But I always like to think of ’em like a room—a little room in the house, full of its family, real busy getting the room-work done up in time.
“From here,” I says, “it does most look like a real town.”
“More folks live in the little towns of the United States than in the big cities of it,” he said, absent.
“They do?” I says.
“By count,” he answers, nodding, and stood a minute looking over at the roofs and the water tower. “You feel that,” he says, “when you see them the way I do. From up high. I keep seeing them skimming under me, little places whose names don’t show. And it always seems that way—like the family at breakfast—or working—or sitting around the arc lamp. You’re splendid—you little towns. What you do is what the world does.”
A kind of shiver took me in the back of my head.
“It looks as if such nice things were going on over there—in Friendship Village,” he says, his voice sort of wrapping about the name.
“Election day is going on,” I says, “day after to-morrow. But it won’t be so very nice.”