Spate had so
distributed them, if it were not the same who had hectored him, for old
Spate had a habit of marrying again. His wives lasted hardly so long as
his hard-driven horses.

Shelby paused to price some of the vegetables, just to draw Spate into
conversation. The old man was all spectacles and whiskers, as he had
always been. Shelby thought he must have been born with spectacles and
whiskers.

Joel Spate, never dreaming who Shelby was, was gracious to him for the
first time in history. He evidently looked upon Shelby as a new-comer
who might be pre-empted for a regular customer before Mrs. L. Bowers,
the rival grocer, got him. It somehow hurt Shelby's homesick heart to be
unrecognized, more than it pleased him to enjoy time's topsy-turvy. Here
he was, returned rich and powerful, to patronize the taskmaster who had
worked him hard and paid him harder in the old years. Yet he dared not
proclaim himself and take his revenge.

He ended the interview by buying a few of the grocer's horrible cigars,
which he gave away to the hotel porter later.

All round the town Shelby wandered, trying to be recognized. But age and
prosperity had altered him beyond recall, though he himself knew almost
every old negro whitewash man, almost every teamster, he met. He was
surer of the first names than of the last, for the first names had been
most used in his day, and it surprised him to find how clearly he
recalled these names and faces, though late acquaintances escaped his
memory with ease.

The women, too, he could generally place, though many who had been
short-skirted tomboys were now heavy-footed matrons of embonpoint with
children at their skirts, children as old as they themselves had been
when he knew them. Some of them, indeed, he recognized only by the
children that lagged alongside like early duplicates.

As he sauntered one street of homely homes redeemed by the opulence of
their foliage, he saw coming his way a woman whose outlines seemed but
the enlargement of some photograph in the gallery of remembrance. Before
she reached him he identified Phoebe Carew.

Her mother, he remembered, had been widowed early and had eked out a
meager income by making chocolate fudge, which the little girl peddled
about town on Saturday afternoons. And now the child, though she must be
thirty or thereabouts, had kept a certain grace of her youth, a wistful
prettiness, a girlish unmarriedness, that marked her as an old maid by
acci