THROUGH THE SECOND WINTER
During the summer, matters at the reading-room and library had been
allowed to drift along to a great extent. Marty and one of his
particular chums had kept the reading-room open evenings during Mr.
Haley's absence; but now Janice knew that the school-teacher would have
his hands quite full without giving any time to the reading-room.
She set about making a second campaign for the advancement of the
institution and the broadening of its work. She found five girls
beside herself willing to keep the reading-room open one afternoon a
week, and to exchange books for the members of the library association.
The institution had proved its value in the community and Janice
privately went to several people who were well able to help, and
collected a fund for the payment of a regular librarian in the evening.
One of the boys who had shown most advancement during the spring in
school work was glad to earn a small wage as librarian and caretaker of
the reading-room evenings. An effort was made, too, to increase the
number of volumes in the library so as to obtain a share of the State
Library Appropriation for the next year.
Janice was not alone interested in the reading-room's affairs. There
was the matter of a new piano for the Sunday-school room. The
instrument in use had been a second-hand one when the Sunday School
obtained it; and it was forever out of tune.
"However can you expect the children to sing in unison, and sing well,
Mr. Scribner," Janice said to the Sunday-school superintendent, "when
there isn't an octave in harmony on the old piano? Come on! let's see
what we can do about getting a brand-new, first-class instrument?"
"Oh, my dear girl! Impossible! quite impossible!" declared the
superintendent, who was a bald, hopeless little man, who kept books for
the biggest store in town, and was imbued with the prevailing Poketown
spirit of "letting well enough alone."
"How do you know it is impossible till you try?" demanded the girl,
laughing. "How much would you give, yourself, toward a new instrument?"
Mr. Scribner winked hard, swallowed, and burst out with: "Ten dollars!
Yes, ma'am! I'd go without a new winter overcoat for the sake of
having a decent piano."
"That's a beginning," Janice said, gravely, seizing paper and pad.
"And I can spare five. Now, don't you see, if we can interest
everybody else in town proportionately, we'd have enough to buy _two_
pianos, let alone one.
"But let us start the subscription papers with our own offerings. You
take one, and I'll take the other. You can ask everybody who comes
into the store, and I'll go out into the highways and hedges and see
what I can gather."
Janice interested the young people's society in the project, too; and
her own enthusiasm, plus that of the other young folks, brought the
thing about. At the usual Sunday-school entertainment on Christmas
night the new piano was used for the first time, and Mrs. Ebbie
Stewart, who played it, fairly cried into her score book, she was so
glad.
"I was so sick of pounding on that old tin-panny thing!" she sobbed.
"A real piano seems too good to be true."
The old Town Hall standing at the head of High Street--just where the
street forked to become two country highways--had a fine stick of
spruce in front of it for a flagpole; but on holidays the flag that was
raised (if the janitor didn't forget it) was tattered like a
battle-banner, and, in addition, was of the vintage of a score of years
before. Our flag has changed some during the last two decades as to
the number of stars and their arrangement on the azure field.
Of a sudden people began to notice the need of a new flag. Who
mentioned it first? Why, that Day girl!
And she kept right on mentioning it until some people began to see that
it was really a disgrace to Poketown--and almost an insult to the flag
itself--to raise such a tattered banner. A grand silk flag, with new
halyards and all, was finally obtained, the Congressman of the district
having been interested in the affair. And on Washington's Birthday the
Congressman himself visited the village and made an address when the
flag was raised for the first time.
Gradually, other improvements and changes had taken place in Poketown.
There was the steamboat dock. It had been falling to pieces for years.
It had originally been built by the town; but the various storekeepers
were most benefited by the wharf, for their freight came by water for
more than half of the year.
Walky Dexter started the subscription among the merchants for the dock
repairs. He subscribed a fair sum himself, too, for he was the
principal teamster in Poketown.
"But who d'you s'pose started Walky?" demanded Mr. Cross Moore,
shrewdly. "Trace it all back to one 'live wire'--that's what! If that
Day gal didn't put the idee into Walky's head for a new dock, I'll eat
my hat!"
And nobody asked Mr. Moore to try that gastronomic feat.
The selectman, himself, seemed to get into line during that winter. He
stopped sneering at Walky Dexter and for some inexplicable reason he
began agitating for better health ordinances.
There was an unreasonable warm spell in February; people in Poketown
had always had open garbage piles during the winter. From this cause
Dr. Poole, the Health Officer, declared, a diphtheria epidemic started
which caused several deaths and necessitated the closing of a part of
the school for four weeks.
Cross Moore put through a garbage-collection ordinance and a certain
farmer out of town was glad of the chance to make a daily collection,
the year around, for the value of the garbage and the small bonus the
town allowed him. If the truth were known Mr. Moore's ordinance was
copied almost word for word from the printed pamphlet of ordinances in
force in a certain town of the Middle West called Greensboro. Now, how
did the selectman obtain that pamphlet, do you suppose?
Yet Poketown, as a whole, looked about as forlorn and unsightly as it
had when Janice Day first saw it. The improvement was not general.
The malady--general neglect--had only been treated in spots.
There were still stores with their windows heaped with flyspecked
goods. The horses still gnawed the boles of the shade trees along High
Street. The flagstone sidewalks were still broken and the gutters
unsightly. High street itself was rutted and muddy all through the
early spring, after the snow had gone.
A few of the merchants patterned after Hopewell Drugg, brightened up
their stores, and exposed only fresh goods for sale. But these few
changes only made the general run of Poketown institutions appear more
slovenly. The contrast was that of a new pair of shoes, or a glossy
hat, on a ragged beggar!
With Janice on one side to spur him, and Miss 'Rill's unbounded faith
in him on the other hand, how _could_ Hopewell Drugg fall back into the
old aimless existence which had cursed him when first Janice had taken
an interest in his little Lottie, his store, and himself?
But, of course, Hopewell could not _make_ trade. He had gained his
full share of the Poketown patronage, and held all his old customers.
But the profits of the business accumulated slowly. As this second
winter drew to a close the storekeeper confessed to Janice that he had
only saved a little over three hundred dollars altogether towards the
betterment of Lottie's condition.
Janice began secretly to complain. Her heart bled for the child, shut
away in the dark and silence. If only Daddy would grow suddenly very
wealthy out of the mine! Or if some fairy godmother would come to
little Lottie's help!
The person who seemed nearest like a fairy godmother to the child was
Miss 'Rill. She spent a great deal of her spare time with the
storekeeper's daughter. Sometimes she went to Mr. Drugg's cottage
alone; but oftener she had Lottie around to the rooms she occupied with
her mother on High Street.
"I declare for't, 'Rill," sputtered old Mrs Scattergood, one day when
Janice happened to be present, "you'll have the hull town talkin'
abeout you. You're in an' aout of Hopewell Drugg's jest as though you
belonged there."
"I'm surely doing no harm, mother," said the little spinster, mildly.
"Everyone knows how this poor child needs somebody's care."
"Wal! let the 'somebody' be somebody else," snapped the old lady. "I
sh'd think you'd be ashamed."
"Ashamed of what, mother?" asked Miss 'Rill, with more spirit than she
usually displayed.
"You know well enough what I mean. Folks will say you're flingin'
yourself at Hopewell Drugg's head. An' after all these years, too.
I----"
"Mother!" exclaimed her daughter, in a low voice, but earnestly.
"Don't you think you did harm enough long, long ago, without beginning
on that tack now?"
"There! that's the thanks one gets when one keeps a gal from makin' a
perfect _fule_ of herself," cried the old lady, bridling. "S'pose
you'd been jest a drudge for Hopewell, all these years, Amarilla
Scattergood?"
"I might not have been a drudge," said Miss 'Rill, softly, flushing
over her needlework. "At least my life--and his--would have been
different."
"Ye don't know how lucky you be," snapped her mother. "And this is all
the thanks I git for tellin' Hopewell Drugg that he'd brought his pigs
to the wrong market."
"At least," said the spinster, with a sigh, "he will never worry you on
that score again, mother--he nor any other man. When a woman gets near
to forty, with more silver than gold in her hair, and the best of her
useless life is behind her, she need expect no change in her estate,
that's sure."
"Ye might be a good deal wuss off," sniffed her mother.
"Perhaps that is so," agreed Miss 'Rill, with a sudden hard little
laugh. "But don't _you_ take pattern by me, Janice, no matter what
folks tell you. Mrs. Beasely is better off than I am. She has the
memory of doing for somebody whom she loved and who loved her. While
I----Well, I'm just an old maid, and when you say that about a woman,
you say the worst!"
"Why, the idee!" exclaimed her mother, with wrath. "I call that flyin'
right in the face of Providence."
"I don't believe that God ever had old maids in the original scheme of
things."
"Humph! didn't He?" snapped Mrs. Scattergood. "Then why is there so
many more women than men in the world? Will you please tell me that,
Amarilla?" and this unanswerable argument closed what Janice realized
was not the first discussion of the unpleasant topic, between the
ex-schoolteacher and her sharp-tongued mother.