n
use."

"No, ma'am," said he, "there is fancy teas of that kind, but you'd have
to send to Philadelphia or New York for them."

"How long would that take?" she asked.

"I reckon it would be four or five days before you'd get it, ma'am,"
said the storekeeper.

"I am afraid," said Miss Annie, looking reflectively along the counter,
"that that would be too long." And then she turned to go, but suddenly
stopped. "Have you any guava jelly?" she asked.

The man smiled. "We don't have no call for anything as fancy as that,
ma'am," he said. "Is there anything else?"

"Not to-day," answered Miss Annie, after throwing a despairing glance
upon the rolls of calicoes, the coils of clothes-lines, the battered tin
boxes of tea and sugar, the dusty and chimneyless kerosene lamps, and
the long rows of canned goods with their gaudy labels; and then she
departed.

When she had gone, the storekeeper returned to his seat on the mackerel
kit, and was accosted by a pensive neighbor in high boots who sat upon
the upturned end of a case of brogans. "You didn't make no sale that
time, Peckett," said he.

"No," said the storekeeper, "her idees is a little too fancy for our
stock of goods."

"Whar's her husband, anyway?" asked a stout, elderly man in linen
trousers and faded alpaca coat, who was seated on two boxes of pearl
starch, one on top of the other. "I've heard that he was a member of the
legislatur'. Is that so?"

"He's not that, you can take my word for it," said Tom Peckett. "Old
Miss Keswick give me to understand that he was in the fertilizing
business."

"That ought to be a good thing for the old lady," said the man on the
starch boxes. "She'll git a discount off her gwarner."

"I never did see," said the pensive neighbor on the brogan case, "how
such things do git twisted. It was only yesterday that I met a man at
Tyson's Mill, who'd just come over from the Valley, and he said he'd
seen this Mr Noles over thar. He's a hoss doctor, and he's going up
through all the farms along thar."

"I reckon when he gits up as fur as he wants to go," said the man on the
starch boxes, "he'll come here and settle fur awhile."

"That won't be so much help to the old lady," said the storekeeper,
"for it wouldn't pay to keep a neffy-in-law just to doctor one sorrel
horse and a pa'r o' oxen."

"I reckon his wife must be 'spectin' him," said the man on the brogan
case, "from her comin' after fancy vittles."

"If he do come," said th