looking handsomer than chorus girls in their dark-blue flannel suits, red belts, and neat blue caps, we look at them full of pride and confidence. Our little boys dream of the time when they will grow up and join the company and wear seven-pound red helmets at fires, and come home tired and muddy in the gray dawn after a fire and demand hot coffee from their admiring women-folks; and as for the Homeburg girls—well, the greatest social function of our town, or of the county for that matter, is the annual ball of the Homeburg fire department.

And let me tell you, when the nine-piece orchestra—all home talent—strikes up the grand march and Chief Dobbs, with his wide-gauge mustache and vacuum-cleaned uniform, leads the company around the hall, every hero with the girl or wife of his heart on his arm and a full hundred couples of the mere laymen crowding in behind, in a long and many-looped line, the Astor ball would have to do business with a brass band and a display of fireworks to attract any more enthusiasm.

That's what the fire department means to us in Homeburg. We don't suffer half so much from fires as we would from the lack of them; and when this new concrete construction makes the world fire-proof, and the Homeburg fire department rusts away and disappears, we will mourn it even more sincerely than we did the opera house with a real gallery, which got over-heated one night twenty-five years ago and burned, compelling us to get along with a mere hall with a flat floor ever afterward.

III

HOMEBURG'S TWO FOUR-HUNDREDTHS

The Struggles of our Best Families to Impress Us

Hold on, Jim. Don't hurry so. Remember I don't have a chance to walk up Fifth Avenue every day. Give me a chance to astonish myself. Here are ten thousand women going by in clothes that would make a lily turn red and burn up with shame, and an equal number of proud gents with curlycue collars on their overcoats, and I want to do the sight justice.

You see all this parade every day, but I don't, and I want to drink it all in. See that feminine explosion in salmon plush! That would paralyze business back home. Watch that hat crossing the street—it ought to be arrested for being without visible means of support—Oh, I see! There's a girl under it with one of those rifle-barrel skirts. Gee! Ssh, Jim! Did you see the lady who just passed? Let's beg her pardon for intruding on this earth. Say, you could peel enough haughtiness off of her to supply eight duchesses and still have enough for the lady cashier at my hotel. I'll bet she is one of your Four Hundred. For goodness' sake, Jim, if we pass any of your social lighthouses, point them out to me. I'm here to see the sights.

I know the rest of the country throws it up to New York a lot because of its Four Hundred, and that the ordinary small-town man gets so scornful when he talks of the idle and diamond-crusted rich, with their poodle-dog pastimes, that he lives in constant danger of stabbing his eyes with his nose. But I'm not that way; I'm interested. Nothing fascinates me so much as the stories in your papers about Mrs. Clymorr Busst's clever pearl earrings, made to resemble door knobs; and about Mrs. Spenser Coyne's determination to have Columbia University removed because it interferes with the view from her garage; and about little Mrs. Justin Wright's charming innocence in buying a whole steamship whenever she goes over to Europe. I'd go a long way to see your Four Hundred perform; and moreover, after I had accumulated a precarious balance on an iron spike fence in order to rest one eye on a genuine duke while he fought his way out of a church with one of your leading local beauties, who had just been affixed to him for life, I would not squint pityingly on the heaving mass of spectators and hiss:

"We don't do this in Homeburg."

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. We haven't a Four Hundred in Homeburg, but we have a Two Four-Hundredths. If you get as much real, solid pleasure and amusement in New York watching your Four Hundred as we do watching the Payleys and the Singers, I envy you. They're worth all the trouble they cause.

For a good many years, Mrs. Wert Payley, wife of the First National Bank, was our Smart Set, all by herself. There was never any question of it. She admitted it, and we didn't take the trouble to deny it. In a way, she was regarded as a public benefactor. Nobody else cared to spend the money necessary to be a Smart Set, and since Mrs. Payley was willing to fight and be bled, so to speak, to give our town tone and inject a little excitement into our prairie lives now and then, we felt that the least we could do was to regard her as a social colossus.

The Payleys were the only people in Homeburg who had lunch at noon, and as early as 1900 they ate it from the bare table. She was the only woman in Homeburg who could "look in" on an afternoon gabble of any kind for a few minutes and get away with it without insulting the hostess. When she shook hands with you, you always grabbed in the wrong place, no matter how much thought you put into it, and while you were readjusting your sights and clawing for her fingers and perspiring with mortification, she was getting a start on you which kept you bashfully humble as long as she was in sight. She was real goods, Mrs. Payley was—not arrogant, but just naturally superior. People who called at the Payleys' evenings were the social lights of Homeburg, and whenever some lady wanted to discharge a few fireworks indicating her social position, she would form a hollow square around Mrs. Payley in public and get intimate with her in full view of everybody. Mrs. Payley ran the town, and everybody was comfortable and content about it until the Singers arrived.

The Singers came from Cincinnati to cashier in the Farmers' State Bank: Mrs. Singer was city bred and city heeled and when she met Mrs. Wert Payley she didn't even blink. She put out her hand a little nor'-nor'east of her chatelaine watch, when Mrs. Payley put out her hand some four inches southwest by south, and waited calmly for Mrs. Payley to correct herself. There was an awful moment of suspense, and when it became evident that the only way to get Mrs. Singer's hand down to the other level would be to excavate beneath her and change her foundations, Mrs. Payley gave in and reached.

War was declared that minute, and I shudder now when I think of the months which followed.

Mrs. Payley, having been on the ground a long time, had fortified it, of course, and was president of all the clubs. But inside of a month Mrs. Singer flanked her position. She declined to join most of the clubs on the plea of being a busy woman, and organized a flower mission. Its object was to distribute flowers to the sick and needy, who generally consisted of Pat Ryan. Pat was nearly smothered in flowers that year, being good-natured, and as the work of collecting said flowers involved a great deal of meeting in the Singer home and dancing in the Singer attic, which was floored with hard maple that winter, Mrs. Singer had the girls of the town organized into a Roman phalanx before spring.