f there was
anything we could do."

"They used to say about town that Mr. Wallis went to an' fro like a
mail-coach an' brought nothin' to pass," announced Mrs. Bickford
without bitterness. "He ought to have had a better chance than he did
in this little neighborhood. You see, he had excellent ideas, but he
never'd learned the machinist's trade, and there was somethin' the
matter with every model he contrived. I used to be real narrow-minded
when he talked about moving 'way up to Lowell, or some o' them places;
I hated to think of leaving my folks; and now I see that I never done
right by him. His ideas was good. I know once he was on a jury, and
there was a man stopping to the tavern where he was, near the court
house, a man that traveled for a firm to Lowell; and they engaged in
talk, an' Mr. Wallis let out some o' his notions an' contrivances, an'
he said that man wouldn't hardly stop to eat, he was so interested,
an' said he'd look for a chance for him up to Lowell. It all sounded
so well that I kind of begun to think about goin' myself. Mr. Wallis
said we'd close the house here, and go an' board through the winter.
But he never heard a word from him, and the disappointment was one he
never got over. I think of it now different from what I did then. I
often used to be kind of disapproving to Mr. Wallis; but there, he
used to be always tellin' over his great projects. Somebody told me
once that a man by the same name of the one he met while he was to
court had got some patents for the very things Mr. Wallis used to be
workin' over; but 't was after he died, an' I don't know's 't was in
him to ever really set things up so other folks could ha' seen their
value. His machines always used to work kind of rickety, but folks
used to come from all round to see 'em; they was curiosities if they
wa'n't nothin' else, an' gave him a name."

Mrs. Bickford paused a moment, with some geranium leaves in her hand,
and seemed to suppress with difficulty a desire to speak even more
freely.

"He was a dreadful notional man," she said at last, regretfully, and
as if this fact were a poor substitute for what had just been in her
mind. "I recollect one time he worked all through the early winter
over my churn, an' got it so it would go three quarters of an hour all
of itself if you wound it up; an' if you'll believe it, he went an'
spent all that time for nothin' when the cow was dry, an' we was with
difficulty borrowin' a pint o' milk