I went down in my pocket for a quarter, automatic. I heard their thanks, and I went on. And it came to me how, all over the country, the whole 100,000,000 of us, more or less, had been met up with to contribute something to relief, and we'd all done it. And it had gone over there to this country and to that. But our hearts had ached, individual and silent, the way mine was aching that day—and there wasn't any means of cabling that ache over to Europe. If there was, if that great ache that was in all of us for the folks over there, could just be gathered up and got over to them in one mass, I thought it would do as much as food and clothes and money to help them.
I stood still by a picket fence I happened to be passing, and I looked down the little street. It had a brick sidewalk and a dirt road and little houses, and the fences hadn't been taken down yet. And all the places looked still and kind of dear.
"They all feel bad," I thought, "just as bad as I do, for folks that's starved. But they can't say so—they can't say so. Only in little dabs of money, sent off separate."
Bennie was swinging on Mis' Holcomb's gate, looking for me. He came running to meet me.
"I found a blue beetle," he says to me. "And that lady's kitty's home, with a bell on. And I got a new nail. An—an—an—"
And I thought: "He ain't no different from them—over there. The little tikes, with no pas and no suppers and nothing to play with, only mebbe a brick to lug."
And there I was, right back to where I started from. And I went out to get supper, with my heart hanging around my neck like a pail of rock.
II
Next day was Memorial Day. And Memorial Day in Friendship Village is something grand.
First the G. A. R. conducts the service in the Court House yard, with benches put up special, and a speech from out of town and paid for.