United States or Barbados ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Masts, spars, fragments of shell-encrusted boats, binnacles, round-houses and galleys, and part of the after-deck of a coasting schooner, had ceased their wanderings and found rest in this vast cemetery of the sea. The legend on a wheel-house, the lettering on a stern or bow, served for mortuary inscription.
Farmer Sprague owned the two round-houses at the seaward end of the village, and wanted a tenant for one of them. Nat applied for it, and declared his calling. "Us can't afford to pay the old prices these times," said the farmer. Nat's eyes had wandered off to the ricks. "You'll find you can when you've seen my work," he answered.
They were embellished with beautiful photographs of deep cuts, suspension-bridges, snow-sheds, railroad-yards, and round-houses. The promoter did a mail-order business and sold the stock by the bagful to elevator men, trained nurses, policemen, porters, clerks, and servant girls.
The business industries and enterprises of the village consist of a number of large dry goods and clothing stores, several shoe stores, nearly a dozen grocery and provision stores, two or three bakeries, confectionery establishments, flour and feed stores, several builders' machine shops, three saw mills, three grist mills, furniture stores, three large hardware stores, the railroad machine shops, round-houses, carriage factories, coopers' and blacksmith shops, three drug stores, two well-equipped printing offices, each of which issues a carefully edited and well patronized newspaper Herald and Democrat and Oneonta Press.
On the west of the opposite hill the road passes out between another pair of round-houses. And down in the heart of the village among the elms facing the churchyard lych-gate stands a fifth, alone. The five, therefore, form an elongated St. Andrew's cross; but nobody can tell for certain who built them, or why.
"You see, Tim," he said, "I've got slathers of money. It's growing all the time, and I ain't spending a cent of it, not so as you can notice... though that Mrs. Summerstone is getting a cold eighteen hundred a year out of me, with board and carriages thrown in, while you an' I are glad to get the leavings of firemen's pails in the round-houses. Just the same, my money's growing.
"Elspeth Mackenzie," I said, "I and two other living men alone know of what your master was accused. It cannot affect him; but these two shall hear your exculpation of him. You enter the village of Gantick between two round-houses set one on each side of the high road where it dips steeply towards the valley bottom.
He took great pains to circulate in our town the story that the railroad company would locate their round-houses and machine shops at Hays City, and that it was to be the town and a splendid business center. A ruinous stampede from our place was the result.
He did such things fairly and grandly, because he could afford to be fair and grand. He, who had eaten the leavings from firemen's pails in round-houses and "scoffed" mulligan-stews at water-tanks, had learned thoroughly the worth of money. He bought the best with the sure knowledge that it was the cheapest.
Word Of The Day