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Ebook has 2310 lines and 99827 words, and 47 pages

SQUIRE PHIN

New York: Harper & Brothers

SQUIRE PHIN

"Miss Lu-ce-e-e had a par-ret,

An' she kep' it in the gar-ret,

An' she fed it on a car-ret,

An' she called him J. Iscar-ret,

Tidy-um,

Tidy-um!

"An' the par-ret had a feather

That was blue in stormy weather,

Or 'twas red,--I donno whether,

But 'twas either one or t'ether,

Tidy-um,

Tidy-um!"

--Favourite Song of "Hard-times" Wharff.

The village sounds in Palermo that sleepy afternoon were only the "summer snorin's," as Marriner Amazeen used to say. There was the murmur of flies buzzing lazily around some banana, skins which curled limply in the August sun in front of Asa Brickett's store. At the side of the building, in a patch of shade, a half-dozen old men, jack-knifed on a rickety settee, droned in intermittent conversation. From open kitchen windows along the village street came subdued sounds of the after-dinner work of the housewives--clash of cutlery and clatter of dishes. In a dusty maple whose lower branches had taken toll from passing loads of hay, a cicada shrilled his long-drawn note, like an almost interminable yawn.

"When August's locusts wind their horn

Then first you know, Good Summer's gone!"

"Well, you don't have to walk very fur in this sun to find out that she ain't gone yit," remarked an old man who had just arrived. He picked a few fresh burdock leaves and stuffed them into the crown of his cotton hat. "Some one ought to make 'Quar'us Wharff come in here out o' that sun," he growled, scowling at a figure that stood on the corner of Brickett's store platform, as straight and stiff as the gnawed hitching-post on the opposite corner.

With cadence fully as sleepy as the other sounds of the languorous afternoon, a squeaking whiffle-tree came down the avenue of elms that bordered the street.

The whiffle-tree was attached to a surrey that showed a city smartness of paint and trimmings under the dust. The bulk of the man on the front seat strained his linen coat. The two ladies on the back seat, evidently his wife and daughter, fairly crushed the springs with their weight.

The portly man pulled up at the watering trough in Palermo's little square and grunted over the wheel. When the horses began to wallow in the tub, plunging their reeking noses almost to their eyes, he handed the reins to his wife and walked toward the store, his gaze upon a bunch of wilted bananas that dangled just inside the door.

The six gaunt men in the shade surveyed this triple display of city avoirdupois with disfavour. Somehow it all seemed a silent boast of urban prosperity.

"I don't reckon his woman needs to hang onto them reins very tight," grunted Uncle Lysimachus Buck. "It's all them horses can do to walk with that load--much less run away."

"All city folks do is stuff themselves mornin', noon and night, and then 'tween meals," said Marriner Amazeen. "He's after suthin' to eat now, and I'll bet ye on it."

"How much for a dozen of those bananas?" asked the rotund man, addressing the individual who stood so stiffly on the corner of the platform.

"Wind sou' by one p'int to the west, havin' swung from west by nothe," was the reply. He did not look at his questioner, but kept his head straight and his nose in the air.

"That ain't nothin' but 'Quar'us havin' a weather-vane spell," apologised Brickett, appearing in the door and lounging against the side of the building. He drawled, "I'll sell ye fifteen for a quarter. Help yourself."

The stranger broke off the fruit, stuffed it into his wide pockets, placed the change in Brickett's languid palm, and went back to his carriage, casting an eye of scorn on the platform sentinel as he repassed him.

Then he climbed painfully back to his seat. With a grunt he pulled the reluctant horses back from the trough, where they were now making pretence of drinking, sucked his tongue at them pantingly and proceeded on his "carriage tour of the coast."

As the horses plodded into the sun-glare from under the village elms, the portly man swung around and said to his wife and daughter: "The town pump and the town clock and the town fool, fifty houses bunched around 'em and everybody asleep! My God, think of living in a place like this all your life."

"The old man standing on the store platform wasn't crazy, was he, papa?" the daughter inquired.

"Why don't you use your eyes once in a while, Belle?" the fat man snorted. "The way country towns let old lunatics run at large is something awful."

He whipped up and the surrey clattered across the bridge at the head of the cove. There was a puff of cool air from the shadows where the tide gurgled about the weedy piles, and the three people went on around the hill with the tang of the salt smell in their nostrils, and in their minds a totally erroneous idea of Palermo and one of its institutions.

"Hard-times" Wharff had been standing for quite two hours in the broiling sun on the extreme corner of Asa Brickett's grocery store platform. His attitude was familiar enough to his townsmen. He was on the tripod, so to speak, as a soothsayer, though it is hardly proper, perhaps, to speak of one leg as a tripod. He wearily balanced himself, shifting feet from time to time. His dingy old felt hat had the crown pinched to a peak and, before and behind, the broad brim was similarly pinched to peaks. The effect was somewhat that of a general's chapeau, and its ludicrous illusion was heightened by a considerable assortment of rooster's tail feathers thrust into the crown.

When "Hard-times"--a name more generally employed locally than Aquarius--stood on one foot in front of Brickett's store, his hat flattened fore and aft--'twas known by local observers that he was having one of his "weather-vane spells." Now, this little fancy harmed no one, and it was agreed in Palermo that no other resident could smell a change of weather so far ahead as Aquarius Wharff.

If he stood on two feet, well balanced, and glowered grimly, he was merely indulging in a fancy for his own amusement. Though he never explained his ruminations to any one, it was suspected that he revelled in a proud triumph of the imagination and felt all the haughtiness of a bald-headed eagle. Certain it is that Palermo respected his abstraction and did not smile when he stroked his plumage and fixed a still more piercing gaze on the horizon.

Aquarius Wharff believed--and his townsmen agreed--that as a weather-vane he was distinctly serviceable to Palermo. He would inveigh against the inaccuracy of the dingy, rusty arrow on the Union Meeting-house, and then would perk his nose into the wind, and rotate himself on his wavering leg to show his own superior manageability. When he permitted himself to play eagle it was purely for his own relaxation.

When he was not engaged in either pursuit Aquarius Wharff was a mild and neighbourly man who lived with his "old maid" sister, Virgo, in the little brown house beyond the currier shop. His twin delusions were his only "outs," and his tolerant neighbours in Palermo had long ago ceased to pay any attention to his divagations. But when a man stands for two hours in the broiling sun in one attitude he makes a picture that disturbs his friends. Uncle Lysimachus Buck, whose chair was propped against the side of the store in the shade, desisted from "teaming" a worried caterpillar with his cane and called querously: "For timenation's sake, 'Quar'us, come set down out o' the sun, do! It makes me steam and sweat to look at ye."

"Wind quart'rin' to west'ard, mack'rel sky, sign o' rain, hard times gen'rally and nothin' 'cept air put into doughnut holes nowadays," croaked Aquarius without turning his head; "I jest see six crows fly s'uth'ards from the Cod-Head spruces, and that means somethin' 'sides a heavy fog."

He shifted to his other leg and set his neck more stiffly, and continued at his feat of endurance with the pertinacity of an Indian fakir.

"He'll git sunstruck, sure's Tophet's a poor place to store powder in," commented Buck. His snappy tones indicated that his selfishness at being annoyed by the figure in the sun's glare was more provoked than his solicitude.

"Why don't you git under a tree and rest?" he demanded. "An' if you're bound and determined to play dog-vane, then hold an emb'rel over yourself. Swan, if it don't make me dizzy to watch him!" Uncle Buck took off his cotton hat and turned the burdock leaves in the crown to bring their cool surface next to his bald head.

"I've thought at times that 'Quar'us was losin' his mind some--more'n what runs in the family," observed Dow Babb, unhooking his toe from behind his ankle and immediately retwisting his long, gaunt legs in the other direction. His townsmen had nicknamed him "Fly" Babb on account of this trait.

"He ain't nobody's fool, 'Quar'us ain't," remarked Brickett, who, in the midday dearth of traffic, was lounging at the shady side of the store. "Them Wharffses is weather-struck and always was so, 'way back. It runs in the fam'ly--seems to! Old Gran'ther Wharff, you know, kept a di'ry of storms, droughts, hot and cold streaks and all such, till the day he died, and his son Zodiac figured out of that di'ry all the signs of storms and so forth. I've got 'em writ some'ere in my desk--change o' wind, birds' flyin's, bugs' actions, cobweb signs on the grass and all! Yass'r, the weather streak runs in the family, all right."

"I reckon it must 'a' been runnin' hard in Zodiac Wharff," snorted Buck, "to make him saddle sech names on to his children as 'Quarius, Capri-cornus, A-rees, Virgo and--what was that light-complected one that went West and got lugged off by a terronado? I can never think of that dum name!"

"Sagittar'us, wa'n't it?" suggested Brickett.

"Ye-e-aw, that's it, and he called them 'Signs of the Zodiac,' Zode did. No wonder the most of 'em died young in that fam'ly! Names like them would kill yaller dogs."

"'Quar'us, ain't you comin' in out o' that blaze o' sun?" rasped Buck.

"Don't buther me when I'm prognosticatin'," replied the stubborn meteorologist; "ain't you gittin' all your weather from me free--and hard times all 'round us at that--wind shiftin's and signs and portents and all the wonders of the heavens? Then lemme alone. Kingbird chasin' a crow," he went on with his eye on the horizon, where the dwarf spruces bristled on Cod-Head like spikes on a huge quillpig. "And 'tain't all weather that's a-comin' this way to-day."

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