s a three-roomed cellar,
brick-floored, cool, and having about it that indefinable cellar smell
which is of mold, and coal, and potatoes, and onions, and kindling wood,
and dill pickles and ashes.

Other girls of Fanny's age, at such times, cleaned out their bureau
drawers and read forbidden novels. Fanny armed herself with the third
best broom, the dust-pan, and an old bushel basket. She swept up chips,
scraped up ashes, scoured the preserve shelves, washed the windows,
cleaned the vegetable bins, and got gritty, and scarlet-cheeked and
streaked with soot. It was a wonderful safety valve, that cellar. A pity
it was that the house had no attic.

Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to
do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that
is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns, or
villages. They have had time to dream in their adolescence. No cars
to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty,
energy-consuming occupations of the city child. Little that is
competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the most
impressionable period, long evenings for reading, long afternoons in the
fields or woods. With the cloth laid, and the bread cut and covered with
a napkin, and the sauce in the glass bowl, and the cookies on a blue
plate, and the potatoes doing very, very slowly, and the kettle steaming
with a Peerybingle cheerfulness, Fanny would stroll out to the front
porch again to watch for the familiar figure to appear around the corner
of Norris Street. She would wear her blue-and-white checked gingham
apron deftly twisted over one hip, and tucked in, in deference to the
passers-by. And the town would go by--Hen Cody's drays, rattling and
thundering; the high school boys thudding down the road, dog-tired and
sweaty in their football suits, or their track pants and jersies, on
their way from the athletic field to the school shower baths; Mrs.
Mosher flying home, her skirts billowing behind her, after a protracted
afternoon at whist; little Ernie Trost with a napkin-covered peach
basket carefully balanced in his hand, waiting for the six-fifteen
interurban to round the corner near the switch, so that he could hand up
his father's supper; Rudie Mass, the butcher, with a moist little packet
of meat in his hand, and lurching ever so slightly, and looking about
defiantly. Oh, Fanny probably never realized how much she saw and