led
into a brown wicker basket with covers; but it did not consort with
elegance to "trapes" home with anything that looked inconvenient or had
legs sticking out of it. So that arrangements of mutual obligation had
to be made: the good woman from whom Mrs Jones had bought her tomatoes
would take charge of the spring chickens Mrs Jones had bought from
another good woman just as soon as not, and deliver them at Mrs Jones's
residence, as under any circumstances she was "going round that way."

It was a scene of activity but not of excitement, or in any sense of
joy. The matter was too hard an importance; it made too much difference
on both sides whether potatoes were twelve or fifteen cents a peck.
The dealers were laconic and the buyers anxious; country neighbours
exchanged the time of day, but under the pressure of affairs. Now and
then a lady of Elgin stopped to gossip with another; the countrywomen
looked on, curious, grim, and a little contemptuous of so much
demonstration and so many words. Life on an Elgin market day was a
serious presentment even when the sun shone, and at times when it rained
or snowed the aesthetic seemed a wholly unjustifiable point of view.
It was not misery, it was even a difficult kind of prosperity, but the
margin was small and the struggle plain. Plain, too, it was that here
was no enterprise of yesterday, no fresh broken ground of dramatic
promise, but a narrow inheritance of the opportunity to live which
generations had grasped before. There were bones in the village
graveyards of Fox County to father all these sharp features; Elgin
market square, indeed, was the biography of Fox County and, in little,
the history of the whole Province. The heart of it was there, the
enduring heart of the new country already old in acquiescence. It was
the deep root of the race in the land, twisted and unlovely, but holding
the promise of all. Something like that Lorne Murchison felt about it as
he stood for a moment in the passage I have mentioned and looked across
the road. The spectacle never failed to cheer him; he was uniformly in
gayer spirits, better satisfied with life and more consciously equal to
what he had to do, on days when the square was full than on days when
it was empty. This morning he had an elation of his own; it touched
everything with more vivid reality. The familiar picture stirred a joy
in him in tune with his private happiness; its undernote came to him
with a pang as keen. The s