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
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