Slippy McGee | Page 6

they who lent my heart their wings to lift it above the misery and
overwork and grief which surrounded me; I am sure I should have sunk
at times, if God had not sent me my little friends, the moths and
butterflies.
Our grounds join Miss Sally Ruth Dexter's on one side and Judge
Hammond Mayne's are just behind us; so that the Judge's black Daddy
January can court our yellow Clélie over one fence, with coy and
delicate love-gifts of sugar-cane and sweet-potato pone in season; and
Miss Sally Ruth's roosters and ours can wholeheartedly pick each
other's eyes out through the other all the year round. These are fowls
with so firm a faith in the Mosaic code of an eye for an eye that when
Miss Sally Ruth has six blind of the right eye we have five blind of the
left. We are at times stung by the Mayne bees, but freely and
bountifully supplied with the Mayne honey, a product of fine flavor.
And our little dog Pitache made it the serious business of his life to
keep the Mayne cats in what he considered their proper bounds.
Major Appleby Cartwright, our neighbor to the other side of Miss Sally
Ruth, has a theory that not alone by our fruits, but by our animals, shall
we be known for what we are. He insists that Pitache wags his tail and
barks in French and considers all cats Protestants, and that Miss Sally
Ruth's hens are all Presbyterians at heart, in spite of the fact that her
roosters are Mormons. The Major likewise insists that you couldn't
possibly hope to know the real Judge Hammond Mayne unless you
knew his pet cats. You admire that calm and imperturbable dignity, that
sphinxlike and yet vigilant poise of bearing which has made Judge
Mayne so notable an ornament of the bench? It is purely feline: "He
caught it from his cats, suh: he caught every God-blessed bit of it from

his cats!"
As one may perceive, we have delicious neighbors!
When we had been settled in Appleboro a little more than a year, and I
had gotten the parish wheels running fairly smooth, we discovered that
by my mother's French house-keeping, that exquisitely careful
house-keeping which uses everything and wastes nothing, my salary
was going to be quite sufficient to cover our modest ménage, thus
leaving my mother's own income practically intact. We could use it in
the parish; but there was so much to be done for that parish that we
were rather at a loss where to begin, or what one thing to accomplish
among so many things crying aloud. But finally, tackling what seemed
to us the worst of these crying evils, we were able to turn the two
empty rooms upstairs into what Madame pleasantly called Guest
Rooms, thus remedying, to the best of our ability, the absolute lack of
any accommodation for the sick and injured poor. And as time passed,
these Guest Rooms, so greatly needed, proved not how much but how
little we could do. We could only afford to maintain two beds on our
small allowance, for they had to be absolutely free, to help those for
whom they were intended--poor folks in immediate and dire need, for
whom the town had no other place except an insanitary room in the jail.
You could be born and baptized in the Guest Rooms, or shriven and
sent thence in hope. More often you were coaxed back to health under
my mother's nursing and Clélie's cooking and the skill of Doctor Walter
Westmoreland.
No bill ever came to the Parish House from Dr. Walter Westmoreland,
whom my poor people look upon as a direct act of Providence in their
behalf. He is an enormous man, big and ruddy and baldheaded and
clean-shaven, with the shoulders of a coal-heaver and legs like a pair of
twin oaks. He is rather absent-minded, but he never forgets the
down-and-out Guest Roomers, and he has a genius for remembering the
mill-children. These are his dear and special charge.
Westmoreland is a great doctor who chooses to live in a small town; he
says you can save as many lives in a little town as a big one, and folks
need you more. He is a socialist who looks upon rich people as being

merely poor people with money; an idealist, who will tell you bluntly
that revelations haven't ceased; they've only changed for the better.
Westmoreland has the courage of a gambler and the heart of a little
child. He likes to lay a huge hand upon my shoulder and tell me to my
teeth that heaven is a habit of heart and hell a condition of liver. I do
not always agree with him; but along with