is haphazard. Course, there's poor sections--reg'lar
_slums_, as they call 'em--in Boston. But the poor, dirty buildings and
the poor, dirty streets, are in sort of a bunch together. They're in
spots; they ain't dribbled all through the town, mixed up with fine
houses, and elegant squares, and boulevards. Nope. Cities know how to
hide their poor spots in some ways. Boston puts its best foot forward,
as the sayin' is.

"But take it right here in Poketown. Now, ain't the good and the bad all
shoveled together? Take Colonel Pa'tridge's fine house on High Street,
stuck in right between Miner's meat shop and old Bill Jones' drygoods
an' groceries--an' I don't know which is the commonest lookin' of the
two."

"There you air right, Miz' Petrie," agreed the Widow Beasely. "Miner's
got so dirty--around his shop I mean--that I hate to buy a piece of meat
there."

"But the other butcher ain't much better," cried another troubled
housewife. "And the flies!"

"Oh, the awful flies!" chorused several.

"Them critters is a pest, an' that's a fac'," declared Mrs. Scattergood.
"Talk abeout the plagues o' Egypt----"

"But Miz' Petrie was tellin' us how Boston was different----"

"My soul and body!" gasped Mrs. Beasely. "I reckon she's told us
enough. It's a fac'. Poketown is all cluttered up--what ain't right down
filthy. An' I don't see as there's anything can be done abeout it."

"Why--Mrs. Beasely--do you believe there is anything so bad that it
can't be helped?" queried Janice, slowly and thoughtfully. It was the
first time her voice had been heard amid the general clatter, since she
had come to sit down. Her nimble fingers were just as busy as any other
ten in the room; but her tongue had been idle.

"They say it's never too late to mend," quote 'Rill Scattergood; "but I
am afraid that Mr. Miner, and Mr. Jones, and some of the rest of the
storekeepers are too old to mend--or be mended!"

"Ain't you right, now, Amarilla!" sniffed her mother.

"'Tain't only the storekeepers," declared Mrs. Petrie, taking up the
tale again. "How many of us--us housekeepers, I mean--insist upon having
things as clean as they should be right around our own back doors?"

"Wa-al," groaned Aunt 'Mira, "it takes suthin' like an airthquake to
start some of the men-folks----"

"Why wait for _them_?" interposed the demure Janice again, knowing that
her aunt would not object if she interrupted her. "Can't we do something
ourselves?"

"I'd like t