I got thirty-one presents this year.  Thirty-one!  I didn’t know I had so many friends in Yorkburg, and my heart was so bursting with surprise and gratitude it just ached.  Ached happy.

We are not often allowed to make regular visits, but I have lots of little talks informal on errands, or messages, or passing; and as I know almost everybody by sight, I have a right large speaking acquaintance.  With some people, Miss Katherine says, that’s the safest kind to have.

You see, Yorkburg is a very small place.  Just three long streets and some short ones going across.  Scratching up everything, it hasn’t got three thousand people in it.  A lot of them are colored.

But it’s very old and historic.  Awful old; so is everything in it.  As for its blue blood, Mrs. Hunt says there’s more in Yorkburg than any place of its size in America.

Most of the strangers who come here, though, seem to prefer to pass on rather than stop, and Miss Webb thinks it’s on account of the blood.  A little red mixed in might wake Yorkburg up, she says, and that’s what it needs—­to know the war is over and the change has come to stay.

But I love Yorkburg, and most of the people are dear.  Some queer.  Old Mrs. Peet is.  Her husband has been dead forty years, but she still keeps his hat on the rack for protection, and whenever any one goes to see her after dark she always calls him, as if he were upstairs.

She lives by herself and is over seventy, and she’s pretended so long that he’s living that they say she really believes he is.  She almost makes you believe it, too.

Miss Bray sent me there one night.  She wanted some cherry-bounce for Eliza Green, who had an awful pain, and after I’d knocked, I’d have run if I’d dared.

In the hall I could hear Mrs. Peet pounding on the floor with her stick.  Then her little piping voice: 

“Mr. Peet, Mr. Peet, you’d better come down!  There’s some one at the door!  You’d better come down, Mr. Peet!”

“It’s just Mary Cary!” I called.  “Miss Bray sent me, Mrs. Peet.  She wants some cherry-bounce.”

“Oh, all right, Mr. Peet.  You needn’t bother to come down.  It’s just little Mary Cary.”  And she opened the door a tiny crack and peeped through.

“Mr. Peet isn’t very well to-night,” she said.  “He’s taken fresh cold.  But you can come in.”

I came; but I didn’t want to.  And if Mr. Peet had come down those steps and shaken hands I wouldn’t have been surprised.  It’s certainly strange how something you know isn’t true seems true; and Mr. Peet, dead forty years, seemed awful alive that night.  Every minute I thought he’d walk in.

She likes you to think he’s living at night.  Every day she goes to his grave, which is in the churchyard right next to where she lives; but at night he comes back to life to her.  She’s so lonely, I think it’s beautiful that he comes.

I make out like I think he comes, too, and I always send him my love, and ask how his rheumatism is.  I tell you, Martha don’t dare smile when I do it.  She don’t even want to.