I says to myself: "What shall I do? What shall I do?"

I crushed the magazine down on my knee, and sat there rocking with it between my hands.

It was just a story about a little fellow with a brick. They met him, a little boy six years old, somewhere in Europe, going along up toward one of the milk stations, at sunrise. They wondered why he carried a brick, and they asked him: "Why do you have the brick?" "You see," he says, "it's so wet. I can get up on this." And he stood on his brick in the mud before the milk station for five hours, waiting for his supplies that was a pint of milk to take home to his mother.

Mebbe it was queer that this struck me all of a heap, when the big war I'd got used to. But you can't get used to the things that hurt a child.

And then I kept thinking about Bennie. Supposing it had been Bennie, with the brick? Bennie was the little boy that his young father had gone back to the old country, and Bennie hadn't any mother. So I had him.

Because I had to do something, I went out on the[Pg 257] porch and called him. He came running from his swing—his coat was too big for him and his ears stuck out, but he was an awful sweet little boy. The kind you want to have around.

"Bennie," I says, "I know little boys hate it. But could you leave me hug you?"

He kind of saw I was feeling bad—like a child can—and he came right up to me and he says:

"I got one hug left. Here it is!"

And he hugged me grand.

Then he ran back down the path, throwing his legs out sideways, kind of like a little calf, the way he does. And I set down on the side stoop, and I cried.

"Oh, blessed God," I says, "supposing Bennie was running round Europe with a brick, waiting five hours in the mud for milk for his ma, that he ain't got none?"

When I feel like that, I can't sit still. I have to walk. So I opened the side gate and left Bennie run through into Mis' Holcomb's yard, that was ironing on her back porch, and I says to her to please keep an eye on him. And then I headed down the street, towards nothing; and my heart just filled out ready to blow up.

As I went, I heard a bell strike. It was a strange bell, and I wondered. Then I remembered.

"The new Town Hall's new bell," I thought. "It's come and it's up. They're trying it."

[Pg 258]

And it seemed like the voice of the town, saying something.

In the door of the newspaper office sat the editor, Luke Norris, his red face and black hair buried behind a tore newspaper.

"Hello, Luke," I says, sheer out of wanting human looks and words from somebody.

He laid down his newspaper, and he took his breath quick and he says: "I wish't Europe wasn't so far off. I'd like to go over there—with a basket."

I overtook little Nuzie Cook, going along home,—little thin thing she was, with such high eye-brows that her face looked like its windows were up.

"Nuzie," I says, "how's your ma?"............