t girl
in Homeburg when young Cyrus McCord went to Chicago to carve out his
future so that he could come home and marry her. But Cyrus didn't carve
out his future. He married it instead, and Mary is almost fifty now,
living alone and getting peculiar, like so many of our lonely old folks
do.

Taking it all around, you can't blame us for feeling a little bit
hostile to the big grabby towns which reach out like tax collectors
every year and take a tithe of our boy and girl crop--first choice too.
But of course we're enormously proud of our Homeburg people who go out
and help run the world, and we watch their careers like hawks. When
Chester Arnett was running for a state office out West, I'll bet twenty
Homeburg families subscribed for a Denver paper to read about him; and
when Deacon White was making his great plunges in Wall Street, Homeburg
looked at the financial page of the Chicago papers first and then read
the baseball. We're as happy over their success as if they were our
children--but it's always embarrassing for a little while when a
Homeburg man who has made good comes back to visit in the old town.
We're aching to rush up and wring his arm off, but we want to know how
he feels about it first. One or two experiences have made us gun-shy. We
can't forget Lyla Enbright, who moved away with her family years ago and
married a national bank or something of the kind in the East. She didn't
come home for ten years, but finally the father died and Lyla came back
to sell off some property. A lot of us had made mud pies with Lyla, and
while she hadn't shown any great genius in that or anything else, she
was jolly and we liked her, so we tried to rush up and greet her
rapturously.

Those who didn't do it say it was one of the funniest things that ever
happened in Homeburg, but I couldn't see it at the time. I was one of
the rushers. Lyla waited until my outstretched hand was within reaching
distance, and then she pulled a lorgnette on me. Say, Jim, did you ever
get right squarely in range of both barrels of an honest-for-God
lorgnette with about a thousand dollars worth of dry goods and a pinch
of brains behind it? If my turn ever comes to face a Gatling gun I hope
to march right up to it like a little man--but lorgnettes? No! Any
hostile army could lick Homeburg by aiming lorgnettes at it. I gave one
look at the thing and fell over myself in heaps getting away. I wouldn't
speak to Sim Bone for a week because he laughed