see--I only meant--excuse me, Mrs. Barnes. I hope
you don't think I meant to be nosey or interferin' in your affairs."

"Of course I don't. You've gone to a lot of trouble on my account as
'tis, and you've been real kind."

The captain hurriedly muttered that he hadn't been kind at all and
watched her as she walked up the short path to Mr. Cobb's front door.
Then, with a solemn shake of the head, he clinched again at the wagon
seat and drove across the road to the hitching-posts before the store.
Thankful opened the door of the "henhouse" and entered.

The interior of the little building was no mare inviting than its
outside. One room, dark, with a bare floor, and with cracked plastered
walls upon which a few calendars and an ancient map were hanging. There
was a worn wooden settee and two wooden armchairs at the front, near the
stove, and at the rear an old-fashioned walnut desk.

At this desk in a shabby, leather-cushioned armchair, sat a little old
man with scant gray hair and a fringe of gray throat whiskers. He wore
steel-rimmed spectacles and over these he peered at his visitor.

"Good mornin'," said Thankful. It seemed to her high time that someone
said something, and the little man had not opened his lips. He did not
open them even now.

"Um," he grunted, and that was all.

"Are you Mr. Solomon Cobb?" she asked. She knew now that he was; he had
changed a great deal since she had last seen him, but his eyes had not
changed, and he still had the habit she remembered, that of pulling at
his whiskers in little, short tugs as if trying to pull them out. "Like
a man hauling wild carrots out of a turnip patch," she wrote Emily when
describing the interview.

He did not answer the question. Instead, after another long look, he
said:

"If you're sellin' books, I don't want none. Don't use 'em."

This was so entirely unexpected that Mrs. Barnes was, for the moment,
confused and taken aback.

"Books!" she repeated, wonderingly. "I didn't say anything about books.
I asked you if you was Mr. Cobb."

Another look. "If you're sellin' or peddlin' or agentin' or anything I
don't want none," said the little man. "I'm tellin' you now so's you can
save your breath and mine. I've got all I want."

Thankful looked at him and his surroundings. This ungracious and
unlooked for reception began to have its effect upon her temper; as she
wrote Emily in the letter, her "back fin began to rise." It was on the
tip of her tong