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It was at lambing-time, and his flock suffered from lack of attention, although as much as he dared he left his sick women and tended his ewes. He ran in debt, too, to the grocery-stores, for he could work very little and earned almost nothing.
But it was mortifyin', and nobody could dispute it, to have company come, and nothin' to put on. Several times she had to withdraw into the wood-house, and stay most of the day, shiverin', and under the cellar-stairs, and round in clothes- presses. But he boasted in prayer-meetin's, and on boxes before grocery-stores, that he wus a law-abidin' citizen; and he wuz.
From the high points I wandered down into the low places, through narrow and tortuous streets; gazed into the stables and cow-houses; watched the tinners, and coppersmiths, and shoemakers as they wound up the labors of the day in their dingy little shops; peered into the greasy little meatshops and antiquated grocery-stores; studied the faces of the good people who slowly wended their way homeward, and bowed to several old ladies out of pure kindliness and good feeling; then wandered back into the public places, still pursued by a green and yellow melancholy.
When the railroad came in, Henry got a job as assistant baggageman. The conductorship was in sight twenty years away, but promised positively by a kind relative when something else appeared on the horizon, and a good job was exchanged for a better one. An enterprising Boston man had established a chain of grocery-stores along the coast, and was monopolizing the business or bidding fair to do so.
Here stood a little old hovel, built, perhaps, of drift-wood, there a row of boat- houses, and beyond them a two-story dwelling, of dark and weather- beaten aspect, the whole intermixed with one or two snug cottages, painted white, a sufficiency of pigsties, and a shoemaker's shop. Two grocery-stores stand opposite each other, in the centre of the village.
The healing-properties of some of our most valuable herbs were first discovered by the Indians, and, as they never had any grocery-stores, the presence of trees that would supply them with sugar was a blessing not likely to be neglected.
"We haven't any children to bother about any more," she said, laughing, "so we take it out in putting knockers on the doors instead of bells and in keeping the grocery-stores out of sight so that the looks of the village green shan't be spoiled."
The firewood was contributed, a load apiece, by the farmers of the country about, and the oil for the lamps was the common gift of the three grocery-stores. There was no carpet, but bright-colored rag rugs lay about on the bare floor, and it was a point of honor with the Ladies' Aid Society of the church to keep these renewed.
But to Una its few straggly streets were a whole cosmos. She knew somebody in every single house. She knew just where the succotash, the cake-boxes, the clothes-lines, were kept in each of the grocery-stores, and on market Saturdays she could wait on herself. She summed up the whole town and its possibilities; and she wondered what opportunities the world out beyond Panama had for her.
Political strife might rage in the grocery-stores, religious differences flame high in the vestibule of the church, and social distinctions embitter the Ladies' Club, but the library was a neutral ground where all parties met, united by a common and disinterested effort. Like all disinterested and generous actions it brought its own reward.
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