ar, I have had a perfectly grand time making acquaintances with
the high and the low and, the in-betweeners; and the sick and well, and
the dear and the queer, and the ancestrals and up-comers, and the rich
and the poor, and every other variety that grows; and now I am as
familiar with most of the family histories as the oldest inhabitant.
That's the nice part of living in a small place. Something depends on
you and you depend on all the rest of the town, but at home you're lost
in numbers and only a few know you're living. Here everybody knows,
also they know some things that perhaps had better be unknown. As for
talk, they are the best talkers on earth, and there's no subject under
the sun they won't talk about. It's an inheritance, Father says, and
has been handed down from ages past, and, though they don't read very
much, they can do more with a little knowledge than most learned people
with their information, and they make anything they mention interesting
from the way they mention it. I love to hear them, and I've heard a
good deal.

Dear, precious Miss Susanna in the secrecy of my bedroom gave me a
little talk a few nights ago, and said she hoped I wouldn't mind, but
as I was young and inexperienced she thought it her duty to tell me
that I must be careful and not too informal, for certain people
wouldn't understand; and that while the Holts were a very good,
respectable family, still they were not-- She stopped and coughed a
little, and of course I understood, but I pretended I didn't, and told
her they were perfectly healthy and I had had more fun with the Holt
children than with any in town, but if she preferred they should not
come to her house to see me I would just stop in theirs sometimes, as I
would not like them to think I was afraid to go with them. I wasn't,
for while I knew they were not historic, they were the most interesting
children I'd ever seen, and it seemed pretty cruel that they were left
out of things because they didn't have forefathers to hang on to, or
money, which of course would speak for itself. And dear, angelic Miss
Susanna, who is so worn out with boarders and their special kind of
human-nature horridness at times that she's hardly got body enough to
cover her soul, said I mustn't misunderstand her, but the Holts had
never gone in the same circles as the other people I had met, and that
customs, though unkind, were hard to overcome, and the oldest son--

I told her not to w