. If there is any one time when I would care less to be a woman
than at any other time, it is on Christmas afternoon, when her men-folks
have gone to sleep and have left her with a few cross children and a
carload of Christmas dinner fragments for company.

That's where you city folks with your servant problem have the best of
us, and I'll not dispute it, Mrs. Jim. On the other hand, the nicest
part of our Homeburg Christmas is the fact that, when we fold our tired
hands over our bulging vests after dinner and lie down to rest, we know
that there is no starving family in Homeburg which has had to celebrate
Christmas by taking on an extra drink of water and indulging in a long,
succulent sniff at a restaurant door.

We have poor people in Homeburg, but we haven't any poverty problem at
Christmas. It's a strictly local issue, and it is handled by the
neighbors. Having lived a long time in the city, Jim, you may not know
what a neighbor is. It's a person who lives close to you and takes a
personal interest in your affairs. A good neighbor is a woman whose
heart is so large that she has had to annex a lot of outlying territory
around the family real estate in order to fill it. No Homeburg woman
would think of constructing an extraordinarily fine pie without sending
a cut over to her nearest neighbor.

About Christmas time we are especially busy neighboring in Homeburg, and
any family which lives near us and isn't going very strong on the
Christmas game, because of sickness or trouble, is our meat. It would be
an insult to go across the town and help a family in some other
neighbor's territory, and that was what got Editor Simpson of the
_Argus_ into trouble a couple of years ago.

Simpson is a young man, a comparative newcomer from the city, and a very
earnest and enterprising party. He runs the _Argus_ on the high gear
and is never so happy as when he is promoting a public movement in real
city style. It occurred to Simpson three years ago that Homeburg ought
not to be behind Chicago in anything, especially at Christmas time, and
so he started a "Good-fellow" movement. They were running it strong in
Chicago that year. Any man who wished to be a "Good Fellow" sent his
name to the "Good-fellow Editor" and offered to provide a Christmas for
one or more poor children. It was a grand idea, stuffed full of
sentiment, and we Homeburg men just naturally ate it up. When the day
before Christmas came, seventy-five "Good Fellows"