"FOLKS"[12]
I dunno whether you like to go to a big meeting or not? Some folks seem to dread them. Well, I love them. Folks never seem to be so much folks as when I'm with them, thousands at a time.
Well, once annually I go to what's a big meeting for us, on the occasion of the Friendship Village Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality's yearly meeting.... I always hope folks won't let that name of us bother them. We don't confine our attention to Cemetery any more. But that's been the name of us for twenty-four years, and we got started calling it that and we can't bear to stop. You know how it is—be it institutions or constitutions or ideas or a way to mix the bread, one of our deformities is that we hate to change.
"Seems to me," says Mis' Postmaster Sykes once, "if we should give up that name, we shouldn't be loyal nor decent nor loving to the dead."
"Shucks," says I, "how about being loyal and decent and loving to the living?"
"Your mind works so queer sometimes, Calliope," says Mis' Sykes, patient.
"Yes—well," I says, "mebbe. But anyhow, it works. It don't just set and set and set, and never hatch nothing."
So we continued to take down bill-boards and put in shrubbery and chase flies and dream beautiful, far-off dreams of sometime getting in sewerage, all under the same undying name.