"I shall lock my door circus day, just the same," says Mis' Sykes.
"Do," says I. "Circuses is likely to be followed up by hoodlums. And I've known them to be native-born, now and again."
But after a while, in spite of his being a foreigner, most everybody got to like Jeffro. You couldn't help it—he was so patient and ready to believe. And the children—the children that like your heart—they all loved him. They would follow him along the curb, and he'd set down and show them his pack—time and again I've come on him in a shady side-street opening his pack for them. And sometimes when he had a new toy made, he'd walk up to the schoolhouse a-purpose to show it to them, and they'd all crowd round him, at recess.
On account of that, the children's folks took to noticing him and speaking to him. And folks done little things for him and for Joseph. Abigail Arnold, that keeps the home bakery, she had him make a wooden bridal pair for the top of the wedding-cake she keeps permanent in her show window; Mis' Timothy Toplady had him do little odd jobs around their place, and she'd pay him with a cooked chicken. He'd show most all of us the picture of his little young wife and the two children—
"I declare," says Mis' Toplady, kind of wondering, "since I've seen the picture of his wife and babies he don't seem to me much more foreign than anybody else."
I happened over to Jeffro's one morning with a loaf of my brown bread and a half a johnny-cake. He seemed to know how to cook pretty well, but still I felt more or less sorry for him and the little boy, and I used to take them in a thing or two less than half occasionally. When I stepped up to the door that night I heard him singing—he used to sing low, funny songs while he worked. And when he opened the door for me, all of a sudden he blushed to the top of his face. And he bowed his funny, stiff way, and says:
"Vell, I see I blush like boys. It is because I was singing a little—vat-you-call, lull'by. Ven I make the toys I am always thinking how little children vill go to sleep holding vat I make, and sometimes I put in lull'bies, in case there is no mother to sing them."
That was like Jeffro. I mention it because Jeffro was just like that.
I'd set down the bread and the johnny-cake, and he'd thanked me—Jeffro always thanked folks like he'd just been give a piece of new life with every kindness—and I dunno but he had—I dunno but we all have; and I'd started to go, when he says hesitating: