ts for diversion. "If you want
to know where the gallants of the Falls are in winter, look for a
sunny spot. They collect in patches of sun, like some kind of bugs or
animals."

As for reading, "Do you like to read?"

"Crazy 'bout readin'."

"What, for instance?"

"Oh, books, movie magazines. Don't ever remember the names of
anything. Swell stories. Gee! I cried and cried over the last one...."

Or, "Do much reading?"

"Na, never git time to read."

My old maids never so much as took the newspaper. They figured that if
news was important enough they'd hear about it sooner or later, and
meanwhile there was much to keep up with at the Falls.

"Can't hardly sleep nights, got so much on my mind," the seventy-sixer
would say.

One night she just got nervous fidgets something awful, worrying lest
her brother might not get to the Baptist chicken dinner after all,
when he'd gone and paid seventy-five cents for his ticket.

Sunday there was church to attend, the Catholics flourishing, the
Episcopalians next, four other denominations tottering this way and
that. I heard the Baptist minister preach that every word in the Bible
was inspired by God, ending with a plea for the family altar.

"Christian brethren, I'm a man who has seen both sides of life. I
could have gone one way. It is by the grace of God and the family
altar that I stand before you the man I am."

There were thirty-one people in the congregation who heard his young
though quavering words, eight of them children, two the organist and
her husband, nine of the remainder women over sixty.

The Methodist, that morning, preached on the need of a revival at the
Falls, and Mr. Welsh, the electrician, whose wife was resting up in
Pennsylvania, thought he was right. Sunday baseball--that day our
bleachery team played the Keen Kutters--pained Mr. Welsh. The
Methodist minister before this one had been a thorn in the flesh of
his congregation. He frankly believed in amusements, disgraced them by
saying out loud at a union service that he favored Sunday baseball.
Another minister got up and "sure made a fool of him," thank goodness.
Where was the renegade now? Called to a church in a large Middle West
city where they have no more sense than to pay him twice what he was
getting at the Falls.

That night I heard a visiting brother at the Methodist church plead
for support for foreign missions, that we might bring the light of the
ideal Christian civilization und