As one may perceive, we have delicious neighbors!

When we had been settled in Appleboro a little more than a year, and I had gotten the parish wheels running fairly smooth, we discovered that by my mother’s French house-keeping, that exquisitely careful house-keeping which uses everything and wastes nothing, my salary was going to be quite sufficient to cover our modest menage, thus leaving my mother’s own income practically intact.  We could use it in the parish; but there was so much to be done for that parish that we were rather at a loss where to begin, or what one thing to accomplish among so many things crying aloud.  But finally, tackling what seemed to us the worst of these crying evils, we were able to turn the two empty rooms upstairs into what Madame pleasantly called Guest Rooms, thus remedying, to the best of our ability, the absolute lack of any accommodation for the sick and injured poor.  And as time passed, these Guest Rooms, so greatly needed, proved not how much but how little we could do.  We could only afford to maintain two beds on our small allowance, for they had to be absolutely free, to help those for whom they were intended—­poor folks in immediate and dire need, for whom the town had no other place except an insanitary room in the jail.  You could be born and baptized in the Guest Rooms, or shriven and sent thence in hope.  More often you were coaxed back to health under my mother’s nursing and Clelie’s cooking and the skill of Doctor Walter Westmoreland.

No bill ever came to the Parish House from Dr. Walter Westmoreland, whom my poor people look upon as a direct act of Providence in their behalf.  He is an enormous man, big and ruddy and baldheaded and clean-shaven, with the shoulders of a coal-heaver and legs like a pair of twin oaks.  He is rather absent-minded, but he never forgets the down-and-out Guest Roomers, and he has a genius for remembering the mill-children.  These are his dear and special charge.

Westmoreland is a great doctor who chooses to live in a small town; he says you can save as many lives in a little town as a big one, and folks need you more.  He is a socialist who looks upon rich people as being merely poor people with money; an idealist, who will tell you bluntly that revelations haven’t ceased; they’ve only changed for the better.

Westmoreland has the courage of a gambler and the heart of a little child.  He likes to lay a huge hand upon my shoulder and tell me to my teeth that heaven is a habit of heart and hell a condition of liver.  I do not always agree with him; but along with everybody else in Appleboro, I love him.  Of all the many goodnesses that God has shown me, I do not count it least that this good and kind man was sent in our need, to heal and befriend the broken and friendless waifs and strays who found for a little space a resting place in our Guest Rooms.

And when I look back I know now that not lightly nor fortuitously was I uprooted from my place and my people and sent hither to impinge upon the lives of many who were to be dearer to me than all that had gone before; I was not idly sent to know and love Westmoreland, and Mary Virginia, and Laurence; and, above all, Slippy McGee, whom we of Appleboro call the Butterfly Man.