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"He'll find some way don't you fear, Janice," said the boy, with much more sympathy than he had ever shown before. Janice squeezed his hand and hid her own face. She could not forget how Marty had tried the evening before to hide the knowledge of her father's fate from her. This was a much different Marty than the boy she had first met at the old Day house on her arrival at Poketown.
He knows some Latin, Haley does," added the boy. "What's Latin, Janice?" "Nothing that will help him in the least to teach the Poketown School," declared his cousin, rather sharply for her. "Isn't that ridiculous! What can that old minister be thinking of?" "The Elder's great on what he calls 'the classics," said Mr. Day, with a chuckle. "He reads the Bible in the 'riginal, as he calls it.
Some curbs were piled shoulder high with boxes of ashes, old bedsprings, broken furniture, decayed mattresses, yard rakings, unsightly pots and pans hidden away for decades in mouldy cellars debris of so many kinds that it would be impossible to catalogue it! For two days, also, hundreds of rubbish fires burned, and the taint of the smoke seemed to saturate every part of Poketown.
Although Janice had enjoyed some of the fun and frolic of the New England winter, she was perfectly delighted to see the season change. It had been late spring when she reached Poketown the year before.
Uncle Jason had begun to take pride in his fields and in his crops. Nobody in all Poketown, or thereabout, had such a garden as the Days this spring. Janice and Mrs. Day attended to it after it was planted. Mr. Day had bought a man-weight hoe and seeding machine, and the garden mould was so fine and free from filth that the "women folks" could use the machine with ease.
One of his ungracious statements, when his store was well filled with customers, brought about the retort pointed from none less that Mrs. Marvin Petrie herself. "Well, Bill Jones," declared that plain-spoken old lady, "we wimmen have made up our minds to clean out the flies, an' all other dirt, if we can. Poketown is unsanitary so Dr. Poole says and we know it's always been slovenly.
"But," said the minister's wife, timidly, "after all, there isn't so much difference between Poketown and Boston, excepting that Boston is so very much bigger. People are about the same everywhere. And one house is like another, only one's bigger " "Now, that's right foolish talk, Miz' Middler!" exclaimed the lady so recently from the Hub.
The steersman had a box in the rear and in this there was room for Janice to ride, too. The sheet-tender likewise ballasted the boat by lying out on one or the other end of the crosspiece. There was a keen wind, not exactly fair for the trip down the lake; yet their sheet filled nicely on the longer tack, and the Fly-by-Night swept out from the Poketown dock at a very satisfactory speed.
"Not a place to smoke those nasty cigarettes in, and carry on; but a real reading-room, with books, and papers, and games, and all that." "Oh, that would be fine! But where'd we get that kind of a place in Poketown?" queried Marty. That was the start of it. There was an empty store on High Street next to the drug store.
It wasn't just like talking to Daddy himself; but it seemed to help some. It enabled her, too, to write shorter letters to friends back in Greensboro and she managed to hide from them much of her homesickness. She could write of the beauty of Poketown itself; for it was beautiful. It was only the people who were so well! so different. Janice welcomed Monday morning.
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