“Thank you kindly for the cot and ‘peace’ is hardly the word I would select if I had to resort to firecrackers at 6:30 A.M. in a young girl’s bedroom,” I says back to him. “And as to where I intend to go, you seem to forget my position as postmistress of China Grove, Mississippi,” I says. “I’ve always got the P.O.”

Well, that made them all sit up and take notice.

I went out front and started digging up some four-o’clocks to plant around the P.O.

“Ah-ah-ah!” says Mama, raising the window. “Those happen to be my four-o’clocks. Everything planted in that star is mine. I’ve never known you to make anything grow in your life.”

“Very well,” I says. “But I take the fern. Even you, Mama, can’t stand there and deny that I’m the one watered that fern. And I happen to know where I can send in a box top and get a packet of one thousand mixed seeds, no two the same kind, free.”

“Oh, where?” Mama wants to know.

But I says, “Too late. You ’tend to your house, and I’ll ’tend to mine. You hear things like that all the time if you know how to listen to the radio. Perfectly marvelous offers. Get anything you want free.”

So I hope to tell you I marched in and got that radio, and they could of all bit a nail in two, especially Stella-Rondo, that it used to belong to, and she well knew she couldn’t get it back, I’d sue for it like a shot. And I very politely took the sewing-machine motor I helped pay the most on to give Mama for Christmas back in 1929, and a good big calendar, with the first-aid remedies on it. The thermometer and the Hawaiian ukulele certainly were rightfully mine, and I stood on the step-ladder and got all my watermelon-rind preserves and every fruit and vegetable I’d put up, every jar. Then I began to pull the tacks out of the bluebird wall vases on the archway to the dining room.

“Who told you you could have those, Miss Priss?” says Mama, fanning as hard as she could.

“I bought ’em and I’ll keep track of ’em,” I says. “I’ll tack ’em up one on each side the post-office window, and you can see ’em when you come to ask me for your mail, if you’re so dead to see ’em.”

“Not I! I’ll never darken the door to that post office again if I live to be a hundred,” Mama says. “Ungrateful child! After all the money we spent on you at the Normal.”

“Me either,” says Stella-Rondo. “You can just let my mail lie there and rot, for all I care. I’ll never come and relieve you of a single, solitary piece.”