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No, the telephone in Homeburg is a very ordinary thing, and we could get along without it quite nicely as far as exertion is concerned, it being only a mile from end to end of the town. But if we had to do without our telephone girls, we'd turn the whole town into a lodge of sorrow and refuse to be comforted. I know of no grander invention than the country town telephone girl.
Where the city marshal hasn't made an arrest for two years because no one has done anything after nine P.M. except snore, and where they have to put up the lamps in pairs to keep them from getting lonesome? We don't print news from Homeburg because there isn't any, and the old rooster who joshed us knows it.
Perhaps he is a lineman at Paynesville, and then again he may be a grocer in some crossroads town near by, with a toll telephone in the back of his store. But if he talks to Carrie long enough and skilfully enough, he will come up to Homeburg, marry her, and bear her away to his lair, far from our bereaved ears.
Agnew, who died the next month of the broken hip, but they couldn't have stuck to the job any more heroically; and when Homeburg citizens talk about "brave fire-laddies" and "homely heroes" at the annual benefit supper of the Volunteer Company No. 1, they mean Pat and Henry, and are perfectly willing to argue the question with any one.
I've lived in Homeburg all my life, but I haven't yet solved the mystery of how some of our citizens own machines. It's a bigger mystery than yours because our automobile owners pay their bills, and the mortgage records don't tell us anything. There's Wilcox, the telegraph operator. He makes seventy-five dollars a month.
We are still close chums, though one is on the coast, another's here in New York, and the third is in the Philippines. It was the next year that I noticed a girl as she stepped off of Number Eleven and was met by one of the Homeburg girls.
The old man turned on his heel without a word and that week he kindled his old-time fires and wrote the following for the local page: A citizen of Homeburg who hasn't done anything more exciting for twenty years than stand off his grocery bill poked fun at the Democrat last week to our face because there wasn't any more news in it. News, say we News in Homeburg?
We can stand just about so much society in Homeburg, but when it gets to elbowing into business, churches, schools and funerals, we are more sensible than you metropolitans are.
Even President Banks of the great F. C. & L. Railroad System, who played on the Homeburg baseball nine thirty-five years ago, will stop puzzling over the financial situation long enough to give the glad hand to a Homeburg man during office hours. Of course I don't mean that any one from Homeburg can break in on him and pile his desk full of feet.
But when I want to see my old Homeburg playmates who have succeeded, I have to go to New York or Chicago or San Francisco, or some other big place where old Opportunity keeps a wrecking crew busy all the time beating in doors. Opportunity doesn't come into a small town and knock. He stands outside and beckons. Life in Homeburg is one long bereavement because of this fact.
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