THE BLIND BROOM-MAKER OF BARNSTABLE.
We were beginning to be desperate, when my companion, strolling about, discovered a small placard saying that fruit was for sale in the freight depot. I set out to explore, having visions of apples and pears, but especially peaches and grapes before me.
Passing the wide freightage doors, I came to a narrow one which was wide open; so I first looked, and then walked in. It was an unfinished place where a slim young woman was busy about her housework, while a sick-looking man was “standing round.” There was a cooking-stove, and she was taking pies out of the oven, which she set in a row on a cumbrous wooden bench that filled all the opposite end of the room, and under it were stored bunches of something unknown to me which I found afterwards was broom-corn. She was pretty and girlish, and had blue eyes, and fair hair.
She asked me to sit down, and told me they had been living there off and on for three years. “We used to live in ‘Commons,’ but we did not like, and so came up here. My husband is not well, and I go out washing, and take in washing.”
It was a very queer place to live in, but neat and comfortable, yet it seemed just as if they might have been moving, and had merely stopped here over night and set up their stove in order to cook something to eat.
Upon inquiring for the fruit, about which it began to seem as if there must be either a mistake or a mystery for nothing of the kind was to be seen except the dish of apples left over from the pies, she directed me up-stairs; and up the steep narrow stairs I went, nearly stumbling over a great black dog (which she assured me would not bite) that lay stretched at the threshold of a dreary kind of room which had one occupant—a man with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows at work near one of the windows at the farther end. And now I remembered that we had seen him at his bench there as we sat in the depot, and wondered what he was doing.
A GAY CAVALCADE.