THE STUBBORN OLD WOMAN

A real story--a human drama--in a very small compass. The pictures are slight by comparison, but then pictures of real gravity might have intensified the emotional experience beyond the call of the format. What we have is a stubborn old woman who refuses to leave her farm though it's crumbling away, piece by piece, into the river below--and an equally stubborn Little girl, sent by the old woman's concerned neighbors, who refuses to leave the farm unless the old woman leaves with her (she's one of a large orphaned family--""We need someone to help look after us""--with a large house). The impasse is broken by the simultaneous disappearance of half the garden and the little girl, who supposedly was weeding it; the old woman is contrite, her neighbors offer no consolation, the loss now of her house (as the last of the land crumbles) seems negligible. But, she learns, the little girl wasn't in the garden when it fell away: she was hiding--to lure the old woman out of the house before it fell away. ""What a wise little girl you are,"" says the woman; ""and she was hardly ever stubborn again."" A set-up, yes, but with a balance of real feeling and adroit construction.