"Will you kindly give me one of those advertising almanacs, Mr. Bowser?" inquired the parson, when his packages of tea and sugar had been secured. "I've misplaced mine, and I want to ascertain at what hour to-morrow the moon changes."
"Certainly, certainly!" responded the storekeeper with obliging alacrity, rubbing his hands together, and stepping up on a chair to reach the pile on a shelf overhead. "Help yourself, sir. I must answer the telephone."
The parson, slowly studying the moon's phases as he stepped out of the store, did not notice that he had taken two almanacs until one fell at his feet. The boy sprang up to return it, but he waved it aside with a courtly sweep of his hand.
"No, my son, I intended to take but one. Keep it. They are for general distribution. You will find it full of useful information. Have you ever learned anything about the signs of the Zodiac? Here is Leo. I always take an especial interest in this sign, because I happened to be born under it. I'm the seventh son of a seventh son, born in the seventh month, and I always take it as a good omen, seven being the perfect number. You know the ancients believed a man's star largely affected his destiny. You will find some interesting historical events enumerated under each month. A good almanac is almost as interesting to study as a good dictionary, my boy. I would advise you to form a habit of referring to both of them frequently."
With one of his rare, childlike smiles the good man passed on, and Perkins's oldest was left with the almanac in his hands. For awhile he studied the signs of the Zodiac, in puzzled awe, trying to establish a relationship between them and the man they surrounded, whose vital organs were obligingly laid open to public inspection, regardless of any personal inconvenience the display might cause him.
Then he turned to the historical events. There was one for each day in the month. On Sunday, the first, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine, had occurred the Japanese typhoon. Friday, the sixth, sixteen hundred and twenty, the Mayflower had sailed. Mahomet's birth had set apart the eleventh in five hundred and seventy. The founding of Mormonism, Washington's Farewell, and the battle of Marathon were further down the list, but it was all Greek to Perkins's oldest. Any one of these items would have been straw for the parson. Out of the Mayflower, Mahomet, Mormonism, or Marathon, each one of them the outgrowth of some September, he could have pressed enough literary brick to build a fair sky-scraping structure that would have been the wonder of all who gazed upon it. This time the boy looked his Angel of Opportunity in the face and did not recognise it as such.
The gate clicked across the road and he turned his head. Miss Anastasia Dill was going up the path, her arms full of goldenrod and white and purple asters. September was a poem to Miss Anastasia, but the boy looked upon goldenrod and the starry asters simply as meadow weeds. The armful of bloom brought no suggestion to him. On the morrow Riley Hines would hand in two pages of allusions to them, beginning with a quotation from Whittier's "Autumn Thoughts," and ending with a couplet from Pope, carefully copied by Maria Hines from the "Exercises for Parsing" in the back of her grammar.
Somebody's supper-horn blew in the distance, and, grown desperate by Tommy's long absence and the lateness of the hour, he took his little cracked slate from the strap of books on the floor beside him, and laid it across his knees. Then with a stubby pencil that squeaked dismally in its passage across the slate, he began copying bodily from the almanac the list of historical events enumerated therein, just as they stood, beginning with the Japanese typhoon on the first, and ending "Volunteer beat Thistle" on the thirtieth, eighteen hundred and eighty-seven.
Then he began to copy a few agricultural notes, inserted as side remarks for those who relied on their almanacs as guide-posts to gardening. "Gather winter squashes now. They keep better when stored in a warm dry place. Harvest sugar beets when the leaves turn yellowish green, etc."
He was bending painfully over this task when a shadow fell across his slate, and, looking up, he saw the old miller looking over his shoulder.