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Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor poor farmers. A model farm! where the house stands like a fungus in a muckheap, chambers for men horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous to one another! Stocked with men! A great grease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk!
Even the Quakers themselves, who affect such supercilious contempt for dress, are very particular about the cut of their headgear, about the shade of their greys and their drabs and their browns, and, in their scrupulous neatness, show that they think as much of a grease-spot or a stain as many a damsel does of the ribbon in her cap or the set of her collar and cuffs.
Four weeks doesn't give you much time to prove that you are the best man in the shop for the place, but it gives you enough to prove that you ain't. You've got plenty of rope. If you know how to use it you can throw your steer and brand it; if you don't, I suppose I won't find much more than a grease-spot where the lard department was, when I get back to the office.
All the others had been dismissed; and it was a hostler from a stable near by who came to take care of the horses." "And what then?" "Then you may imagine what I looked like in the midst of all this magnificence, with my old shoes and my fourpenny skirt. Something like a grease-spot on a satin dress. M. Vincent seemed delighted, nevertheless.
The miller thought of them all the afternoon and all the way home, and when he sat down at his fire his eyes very naturally and simply rose to his old rifle over the door and then he laughed to himself so loudly that old Hon heard him. "Air you goin' crazy, Billy?" she asked. "Whut you studyin' 'bout?" "Nothin'; I was jest a-thinkin' Devil Judd wouldn't leave a grease-spot of him."
That day at noon, when I came out of the dining-room from dinner, my light-colored Derby hat was missing; and as another one was there which resembled mine very closely, and fitted me exactly, I put it on, keeping a look-out for the wearer of my own. As it had a large grease-spot on one side, from the dripping of oil from my street lamps I knew I could tell it easily.
"Ay, ay," growled a grim rammer-and-sponger behind me; "it's all devilish fine for you nobs to look at; but what would you say if you had to holy-stone the deck yourselves, and wear out your elbows in polishing this cursed old iron, besides getting a dozen at the gangway, if you dropped a grease-spot on deck in your mess? Ay, ay, devilish fine for you, but devilish dull for us!"
She hobbles slowly and painfully up to the place just vacated puts her crutches aside, kneels down, and, bowing low her palsied head, presses a dry, shriveled, and leathery kiss upon the grease-spot left by the fat woman. Thrice she performed this ceremony, mumbling over in her guttural way the prescribed formula; and then rising, regained her crutches, and begged for alms.
He discovered his mistake, and was about to trade back, when I happened to think of what a splendid chance I had for making a little raise. As he handed me my hat I said: "Thunderation! Do you suppose I am going to let you give me back my hat with that big grease-spot on it? Not much, sir. Have you been down in some grocer's cellar with my hat on?
Pierrette came down before the dinner-hour to lay the table. Sylvie had been forced to cook the dinner, and had sworn at that "cursed Pierrette" for a spot she had made on her gown, wasn't it plain that if Pierrette had done her own work Sylvie wouldn't have got that grease-spot on her silk dress? "Oh, here you are, peakling?
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