"Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for exercise," they used to tell me; and I used to think: "Yes, but what about just messing-round?" That don't get itself counted in at all, and that just eats up time by the dialful. And I think, if you look close, that one of the things we've got to learn is how to do less of the little hectoring, wearing messing-round, and to do more of the big, plain, real, true, unvarnished living—like real work, and real play, and real talk, and real thinking. And fewer little jobs—fewer little jobs.
But after a while the winter got done, and early April came—a little faint green down below, a little fine gold up above, and a great wide wash of pale blue at the top; Spring in three layers.
I'd been often to see Joseph, and he was well, and in the reader ahead of the reader a boy of his age would naturally have been in. He had had several short letters from his father, and I was looking to have one of them say when we might expect him, but none of them did.
Then in April no letter came. We thought it meant that he'd be home. I'd been over and cleaned the little house. And then when April was almost to a close, and he hadn't come yet, I saw it would be too late for his garden, so I planted that—a few vegetables, and a few flowers, and a morning-glory or two over the stoop. And I laid in a few canned things in his cupboard, so's he would have something to start in on.
May came, and we wondered. Then one day there was a letter in a strange writing. Jeffro was in the hospital, it said, and he wanted to send word that he was all right and would send a letter himself in a little while. That was all that it told us.
Everybody in Friendship Village remembers that spring, because it was the year the bank closed down. Nobody knew the reason. Some day, when the world gets really to going, one of the things they'll read about in musty books and marvel over will be the things we call panics. They'll know then that, put simple, it's just another name for somebody's greed, dressed up becoming as Conditions. We're beginning now to look at the quality of the clothes Conditions dress in, and we're finding them pretty poor quality sometimes, and cut awful old-fashioned, and the dye rubs off. But in those days, all we knew was that the bank had "suspended payment."
"But what's that mean—'suspended payment?'" I says to Silas Sykes that told me. "You can't suspend your debts, can you? I never could."
"It means," Silas says, "that they'll never pay a cent on the dollar. That's what it means."
"But," I says, "I don't understand. If I owe you ten dollars, I can't put down my curtain and suspend that payment, can I?"