He’s so popular they start in to oblige him, and then, someway, he makes them all interested.  I must tell you of a funny letter he had to-day from a Captain Ferguson, out at Baxter.  He’s a rich farmer with lots of influence and a great worker, Mr. Lossing says.  But this is ’most word for word what he wrote:  ’Dear Sir:  I am sorry for the Russians, but my wife is down with the la grippe, and I can’t get a hired girl; so I have to stay with her.  If you’ll get me a hired girl, I’ll get you a lot of money for the Russians.’”

“Did he git a girl?  I mean Mr. Lossing.”

“No, ma’am.  He said he’d try if it was the city, but it was easier finding gold-mines than girls that would go into the country.  See here, I’m forgetting your presents.  Mother, you look real dragged and—­queer!”

“It’s nothing; jist a thought kinder struck me ’bout—­’bout that girl.”

Tilly was sorting out the parcels and explaining them; at the end of her task her mind harked back to an old grievance.  “Mother,” said she, “I’ve been thinking for a long time, and I’ve made up my mind.”

“Yes, dearie.”  Mrs. Louder’s eyes grew troubled.  She knew something of the quality of Tilly’s mind, which resembled her father’s in a peculiar immobility.  Once let her decision run into any mould (be it whatsoever it might), and let it stiffen, there was no chance, any more than with other iron things, of its bending.

“Positively I could hardly get up the stairs today,” said Tilly—­ she was putting her jacket and hat away in her orderly fashion; of necessity her back was to Mrs. Louder—­“there was such a raft of people wanting to send stuff and messages to you.  You are just working yourself to death; and, mother, I am convinced we have got to move!”

Mrs. Louder dropped into a chair and gasped.  The baby, who had fallen asleep, stirred uneasily.  It was not a pretty child; its face was heavy, its little cheeks were roughened by the wind, its lower lip sagged, its chin creased into the semblance of a fat old man’s.  But Jane Louder gazed down on it with infinite compassion.  She stroked its head as she spoke.

“Tilly,” said she, “I’ve been in this block, Mrs. Carleton and me, ever since it was built; and, some way, between us we’ve managed to keep the run of all the folks in it; at least when they were in any trouble.  We’ve worked together like sisters.  She’s ’Piscopal, and I guess I’m Unitarian; but never a word between us.  We tended the Willardses through diphtheria and the Hopkinses through small-pox, and we steamed and fumigated the rooms together.  It was her first found out the Dillses were letting that twelve-year-old child run the gasoline stove, and she threatened to tell Mr. Lossing, and they begged off; and when it exploded we put it out together, with flour out of her flour-barrel, for the poor, shiftless things hadn’t half a sack full of their own; and her and me, we took half the care of that little neglected Ellis baby that was always sitting down in the sticky fly-paper, poor innocent child.  He’s took the valedictory at the High School, Tilly, now.  No, Tilly, I couldn’t bring myself to leave this building, where I’ve married them, and buried them, and born them, you may say, being with so many of their mothers; I feel like they was all my children.  Don’t ask me.”