low-browed little
places with faded black scrolls above the door, on which you might read
in dim gilt letters (or it might be in white)

"LICENS'D TO SELL TEA & TOBACCO."

"Licens'd" was on one corner of the ribboned scroll, "To Sell Tea &"
occupied the flowing arch above, with "Tobacco" in the other corner.
When you mounted two steps and opened the door, a bell of some kind went
"_ping_" in the interior, and an old woman in a mutch, with big specs
slipping down her nose, would come up a step from a dim little room
behind, and wiping her sunken mouth with her apron--she had just left
her tea--would say, "What's your wull the day, sir?" And if you said
your "wull" was tobacco, she would answer, "Ou, sir, I dinna sell ocht
now but the tape and sweeties." And then you went away, sadly.

With the exception of the dirty man's shop and the drunken man's shop,
that kind of shop was the Barbie kind of shop. But Wilson changed all
that. One side of the Emporium was crammed with pots, pans, pails,
scythes, gardening implements, and saws, with a big barrel of paraffin
partitioned off in a corner. The rafters on that side were bristling and
hoary with brushes of all kinds dependent from the roof, so that the
minister's wife (who was a six-footer) went off with a brush in her
bonnet once. Behind the other counter were canisters in goodly rows,
barrels of flour and bags of meal, and great yellow cheeses in the
window. The rafters here were heavy with their wealth of hams,
brown-skinned flitches of bacon interspersed with the white tight-corded
home-cured--"Barbie's Best," as Wilson christened it. All along the
back, in glass cases to keep them unsullied, were bales of cloth, layer
on layer to the roof. It was a pleasure to go into the place, so big and
bien was it, and to smell it on a frosty night set your teeth watering.
There was always a big barrel of American apples just inside the door,
and their homely fragrance wooed you from afar, the mellow savour
cuddling round you half a mile off. Barbie boys had despised the
provision trade, heretofore, as a mean and meagre occupation; but now
the imagination of each gallant youth was fired and radiant--he meant to
be a grocer.

Mrs. Wilson presided over the Emporium. Wilson had a treasure in his
wife. She was Aberdeen born and bred, but her manner was the manner of
the South and West. There is a broad difference of character between the
peoples of East and West S