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You give me a thousand dollars for my car, and I'll agree to haul that old calliope up to my barn, out of your way, and make a hen roost out of it. Come on now. It's your only chance." Shortly after this they are parted by anxious friends, and the show is over. I've known Homeburg men to give up a trip to Chicago because Chet and Pelty began to trade their autos just before train time.
It is Sim's hope and dream that sometime the annual receipts of the Homeburg post-office will just miss being enough to bring a raise in salary. Then Sim will bring it to Flint's attention that he would have bought his ten dollars' worth of stamps that year at home, if Flint hadn't advertised his lock box for rent when he neglected the quarterly dues.
He commands a battleship for a living now; and Homeburg is exactly seven miles from the nearest stream that is navigable by a duck. We used to walk out to that stream Saturday mornings, spend four hours building a dam and then swim painfully on our elbows and knees in the puddle we had made until dark, but Shinner wouldn't go in.
When Chester Arnett was running for a state office out West, I'll bet twenty Homeburg families subscribed for a Denver paper to read about him; and when Deacon White was making his great plunges in Wall Street, Homeburg looked at the financial page of the Chicago papers first and then read the baseball.
Because we would do it fast enough if we had a chance. We don't have anything like your Smart Set, of course, but I desire to say with pride that while there aren't enough tiaras in Homeburg to fill a pill box, and the only limousine we possess is the closed carriage which is used for the family of the deceased at funerals, we have our exclusive and magnificent class just as New York has.
And DeLancey hasn't been fifty miles from Homeburg since he slipped the clutch out of his tired, throbbing brain and let it rest, nine years ago. We have to admire his ingenuity. He kills time so scientifically. They say it takes him two hours to do himself up in the morning after he gets out of bed, and that he has almost as many beautifying tools as an actress.
Here the other fellow's car is his own business. But in Homeburg an automobile is every one's business. It's like the weekly newspaper, or the new minister, or the latest wedding it's common property. Since gasoline has been domesticated we're all enthusiasts, whether we are customers or not. The man who can't talk automobile is as lonely as the chap who can't play golf at a country club.
You may not believe it, Jim, but I am an alumnus of the Homeburg band. Didn't suspect that I was anything but an ordinary citizen, did you? But it's a fact. I am a band man. I'm too modest to brag about it, but I was carrying a horn and had a uniform before I was eighteen. I suppose there is nothing, not even the fire department, that fills a small town boy with such wild ambition as a band.
I'll bet that's just about the number of Massachusetts young men who have gone West or somewhere, and haven't remembered the things they said at parting as well as the girls did. We've got plenty of girls in Homeburg who are getting intimately acquainted with the thirties fine girls, still pretty, bright, and keeping up with the world.
I feel, when I wander up that fine old shady street, past those houses filled with people who are only as wise as I am, as if I were wandering through the deserted haunts of an ancient and irreplaceable civilization. That's the way it goes with us one bereavement after another. It's mighty hard to be a mother of sons in Homeburg.
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