. Suppose you
don't have as many children as your grandmothers had; I can tell by
lookin' at your faces that you're good wives and good mothers; you
love the three or four children you've got as well as your
grandmothers loved their twelve or fifteen, and that's the main
p'int--the way you love your children, not how many children you
have. And further than that,' says I, 'there's such a thing nowadays
as a woman havin' so many children that she hasn't got time to be a
mother, but that's a p'int that men don't consider. And,' says I,
'when I think of all the good work you've done and all you're goin'
to do, I feel like praisin' God. For I know you're helpin' this old
world and this old State to go on like the apostle said we ought to
go, "from glory to glory."'

"And bless your life," laughed Aunt Jane, "if they didn't clap their
hands like they never would stop, and one lady come over and kissed
me, and says, 'That's the best speech I ever heard at a woman's club.'

"And I reckon," concluded Aunt Jane with a gay laugh, "that if Uncle
Billy happened to hear about me speakin' at a woman's club, he'd think
that Sodom and Gomorrah was spreadin' clear down into the Goshen
neighborhood."

"How would you like to live with Henrietta, Aunt Jane?" I asked.

"Child, child," said Aunt Jane with a reproving shake of her head,
"you know better than to ask such a question. That visit to
Henrietta's was like climbin' a hill that you've lived on the other
side of all your life. I've been to the top o' the hill and seen
what's on the other side, and I've come back to my own place. Solomon
says there's a time for everything, and I don't need any Solomon to
tell me that there's a place for everybody; and this old house and
this old farm is the only place that could ever be home to me, and I'm
here to stay till they carry me out through that gate yonder and lay
my bones over in the old buryin'-ground alongside of Abram's and the
children's and the rest of them that's gone before me."

V

THE MARRIAGE PROBLEM IN GOSHEN

[Illustration]

V

THE MARRIAGE PROBLEM IN GOSHEN

Aunt Jane folded the country newspaper that she had been reading and
laid it on the family Bible at her elbow. Her face was grave, and she
sighed as she took up her knitting.

"I sometimes think, honey," she said, in answer to my look of inquiry,
"that if I want to keep my faith in God and man I'll have to quit
readin' the newspapers. I try to