ught he'd stick here all
evening, and--I want to kiss you, my old honey, my comrade!"

CHAPTER XVII

The Lipsittsville Pioneer Shoe Store found Mr. Seth Appleby the best
investment it had ever made. The proprietor was timorous about having
given away thirty-three per cent. of his profits. But Mr. Appleby did
attract customers--from the banker's college-bred daughter to farmers
from the other side of the Lake--and he really did sell more shoes. He
became a person of lasting importance.

In a village, every clerk, every tradesman, has something of the same
distinctive importance as the doctors, the lawyers, the ministers. It
really makes a difference to you when Jim Smith changes from Brown's
grocery to Robinson's, because Jim knows what kind of sugar-corn you
like, and your second cousin married Jim's best friend. Bill Blank, the
tailor, is not just a mysterious agent who produces your clothes, but a
real personality, whose wife's bonnet is worth your study, even though
you are the wife of the mayor. So to every person in Lipsittsville Mr.
Seth Appleby was not just a lowly person on a stool who helped one in
the choice of shoes. He was a person, he was their brother, to be loved
or hated. If he had gone out of the shoe business there would have been
something else for him to do--he would have sold farm machinery or
driven on a rural mail route or collected rents, and have kept the same
acquaintances.

It was very pleasant to Father to pass down the village street in the
sun, to call the town policeman "Ben" and the town banker "Major" and
the town newspaperman "Lym," and to be hailed as "Seth" in return. It
was diverting to join the little group of G. A. R. men in the back of
the Filson Land and Farms Company office, and have even the heroes of
Gettysburg pet him as a promising young adventurer and ask for his tales
of tramping.

Father was rather conscience-stricken when he saw how the town accepted
his pretense of being an explorer, but when he tried to tell the truth
everybody thought that he was merely being modest, and he finally
settled down contentedly to being a hero, to the great satisfaction of
all the town, which pointed out to unfortunate citizens of Freiburg and
Hongkong and Bryan and other rival villages that none of them had a
real up-to-date hero with all modern geographical improvements. In time,
as his partner, the shoeman, had predicted, Father was elected president
of the clubless countr