musingly, "even when you're real poor you can always find somethin'
to give. Like Mis' Sweet. Did I ever tell you about Mis' Sweet? She
lived in our village and she was mortal poor all her life. When her
husband lived he didn't do no more work than he had to and she had to
git along as best she could, and then when he died she lived with her
son, who was so mean and stingy that he made her go to bed at dark
so's she wouldn't burn kerosene. She was so poor that she never had
cookies or cakes to send her neighbors, and it kind o' cut her,
because in the country we was always sendin' some little thing we'd
been bakin' to each other, because that's about the only kind of
presents country women can make to each other, somethin' they make
themselves.

"So Mis' Sweet felt kind o' bad that she couldn't make no return.
But, as I says, one ain't never too poor but that they kin give
something. Now Mis' Sweet and nothin' pretty in her house, and never
saw much that was beautiful, but she had beautiful thoughts inside,
and she loved the flowers and things that grew around her.

"Mis' Sweet made paper flowers trying to say the beautiful things
she felt inside, jest like that poet. She couldn't buy none of the
pretty crinkled papers that we see nowadays; she never saw none of
those; but she saved all the little pieces of tissue paper, and any
scrap of silk, and the neighbors saved 'em for her too, and they
saved their broom wire; and no one ever thought of throwin' away an
old green window shade--it was sent to Mis' Sweet for her leaves. She
twisted the broom wires with any piece of green paper that she could
git hold of, and she cut the papers into flowers, the white ones into
daisies and the little pieces of silk was colored with dyes that the
neighbors give her that they had left over, and she made roses and