door swiftly on the
brown mare. Nicholas closed the drawer and laid the torn sheet of
wrapping paper back in its place. A little girl came in for a card of
hooks and eyes for her mother, a dressmaker, and he gave them to her and
dropped the nickel in the till. When she went out he followed her to the
door and stood looking out into the gray dust of the street.

Across the way a lady was gathering roses from a vine that clambered
over her piazza, and the sunlight struck straight at her gracious
figure. From afar off came the sound of children laughing. Down the
street several mild-eyed Jersey cows were driven by a little negro to
the court-house green. In a near tree a wood-bird sang a score of
dreamy notes. Gradually the quiet of the scene wrought its spell upon
him--the insistent languor drugged him like a narcotic. On the wide,
restless globe there is perhaps no village of three streets, no
settlement that has been made by man, so utterly the cradle of
quiescence. From the listless battlefields, where grass runs green and
wild, to the little whiter washed gaol, where roses bloom, it is a
petrified memory, a perennial day dream.

The lady across the street passed under her rose vine, her basket filled
with creamy clusters. The cows filed lazily on the court-house green.
The wood-bird in the near tree sang over its dreamy notes. The clear
black shadows in the street lay like full-length figures across the
vivid sunlight.

The bitterness passed slowly from his lips. He turned, and was
reentering the shop, when his name was called sharply.

"Why, Nick Burr!"

The words were Eugenia's, but the voice was Tom Bassett's. He had come
up suddenly with the judge, and as Nicholas turned he caught his hand in
a hearty grasp.

"Well, I call this luck!" he cried. "I say, Nick, you haven't grown bald
since I saw you. Do you remember the time you shaved every strand of
hair off your head so we'd stop calling you 'Carrotty'?"

"I remember you called me 'Baldy,'" said Nicholas, running his hand
through his thick, red hair. Then he looked at the judge. "I hope you
are well, sir," he added.

The judge bowed with his fine-flavoured courtesy. "As I trust you are,"
he returned graciously.

"Well, all I've got to say," put in Tom, as his father finished, "is
that it's a shame--a confounded shame. What good will Nick's brains do
him in old Pollard's store? Old Pollard's a skinflint, anyway, and he
cuffed me once when I was a small