minable study--is "Aunt"
Martha Merryfield. She has lived here since the early fifties, and was a
Perkins, one of the eleven Perkins children that grew up in town; and
the Perkinses were related by marriage to the Mortons, of whom there are
over fifty living adult descendants on the town-site now. So one begins
to see why she is called "Aunt Martha" Merryfield. She is literally aunt
to over a hundred people here, and the habit of calling her aunt has
spread from them to the rest of the population.

She lives alone in the big brick house on the hill, though her children
and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in and out all day and
most of the night, so that she is not at all lonesome. She is the only
person to whom we can look for accurate information about local history,
and when a man dies who has been at all prominent in affairs of the town
or county or State, we always call up "Aunt" Martha on the 'phone, or
send a reporter to her, to learn the real printable and unprintable
truth about him. She knows whom he "went with" before he was married,
and why they "broke off," and what crowd he associated with in the early
days; how he got his money, and what they used to "say" about him. If a
family began putting on frills, she can tell how the head of the house
got his start by stealing "aid" sent to the grasshopper sufferers and
opening a store with the goods. If a woman begins speaking of the hired
girl as her "maid," contrary to the vernacular rules of the town, Aunt
Martha does not hesitate to bring up the subject of the flour-sack
underwear which the woman wore when she was a girl during the drought of
'60.

Aunt Martha used to bring us flowers for the office table, and it was
her delight to sit down and take out her corn-knife--as she called
it--and go after the town shams. She has promised a dozen times to write
an article for the paper, which she says we dare not print, entitled
"Self-made Women I Have Known." She says that men were always bragging
about how they had clerked, worked on farms, dug ditches and whacked
mules across the plains before the railroads came; but that their wives
insisted that they were princesses of the royal blood. She says she is
going to include in her Self-made Women only those who have worked out,
and she maintains that we will be surprised at the list.

Her particular animosity in the town is Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington.
Aunt Martha told us that when Tim Neal came to town he