Peace in Friendship Village. Gale Zona

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      THE FEAST OF NATIONS[1]

      Three-four of us older ones were down winding up Red Cross, and eight-ten of our daughters were helping; not my daughter—I ain't connect'—but Friendship Village daughters in general. Or I don't know but it was us older ones that were helping them. Anyway, Red Cross was being wound up from being active, and the rooms were going to be rented to a sewing-machine man. And that night we were to have our final entertainment in the Friendship Village Opera House, and we were all going to be in it.

      There was a sound from the stairs like something walking with six feet, and little Achilles Poulaki came in. He always stumbled even when there was nothing in sight but the floor—he was that age. He was the Sykeses' grocery delivery boy, that Mis' Sykes thinks is her social secretary as well, and he'd been errand boy for us all day.

      "Anything else, Mis' Sykes?" he says.

      "I wonder," says Mis' Sykes, "if Killy can't take that basket of cotton pieces down to old Mis' Herman, for her woolen rugs?"

      We all thought he could, and some of the girls went to work to find the basket for him.

      "Killy," I says, "I hear you can speak a nice Greek piece."

      He didn't say anything. He hardly ever did say anything.

      "Can you?" I pressed him, because somebody had been telling me that he could speak a piece his Greek grandfather had taught him.

      "Yes'm," he says.

      "Will you?" I took it further.

      "No'm," he says, in exactly the same tone.

      "You ought to speak it for me," I said. "I'm going to be Greece in the show to-night."

      But they brought the basket then, and he went off with it. He was a little thin-legged chap—such awful thin legs he had, and a pale neck, and cropped hair, and high eyebrows and big, chapped hands.

      "Don't you drop it, now!" says Mis' Sykes, that always uses a club when a sliver would do it.

      Achilles straightened up his thin little shoulders and threw out his thin little chest, and says he:

      "My grandfather was in the gover'ment."

      "Go on!" says Mis' Sykes. "In Greece?"

      "Sure," he says—which wasn't Greek talk, though I bet Greek boys have got something like it.

      Then Achilles was scared to think he'd spoke, and he run off, still stumbling. His father had been killed in a strike in the Friendship mills, and his mother was sick and tried to sew some; and she hadn't nothing left that wasn't married, only Achilles.

      The work went on among us as before, only I always waste a lot of time watching the girls work. I love to see girls working together—they seem to touch at things with the tips of their fingers. They remind me of butterflies washing out their own wings. And yet what a lot they could get done, and how capable they got to be. Ina Clare and Irene Ayres and Ruth Holcomb and some more—they were packing up and making a regular lark of it. Seemed like they were so big and strong and young they could do 'most anything. Seemed like it was a shame to close down Red Cross and send them back to their separate church choirs and such, to operate in, exclusive.

      That was what I was thinking when Mis' Silas Sykes broke in—her that's the leading woman of the Friendship Village caste of folks.

      "I don't know," says Mis' Sykes, "I don't know but pride is wicked. But I cannot help feeling pride that I've lived in Friendship Village for three generations of us, unbroken. And for three generations back of that we were American, on American soil, under the American flag—as soon as ever it got here."

      "Was you?" I says. "Well, a strain of me is English, and a touch of me way back was Scotch-Irish; and I've got a little Welsh. And I'd СКАЧАТЬ