The Story of a Country Town

by E. W. Howe

He ran on gayly in this way, making himself out in ignorance and muscle the equal of one of our Fairview farmers, although he was really nothing else to my mind than a fop, until Agnes came in and said we were to walk out to supper. There was no one in the supper room when we entered it, and although I expected other members of the family every moment, none came. Agnes was there most of the time, but did not sit down, and supplied the place of a servant.

“Those of us who live in the country,” said Mr. Biggs, helping me to meat and bread with the greatest ceremony, “cannot be particular as to what we eat, except that it is substantial and hearty. Meat and bread and milk make muscle, and muscle is in great demand on a farm. Big Adam and I find a great deal of it necessary in tilling these four hundred acres, therefore we insist on plenty of plain and substantial food. Excuse me, if I eat like a hog.”

The supper was a very good one, but he talked a great deal about its being plain but hearty; and although he was dainty in his eating, and ate nothing but bread and milk, and toasted bread and tea, he kept apologizing for his ravenous appetite. He had something to say, too, about shovelling in his food with a knife, and bolting it—he did neither, but on the contrary was very delicate—and as he kept watching me, I thought that he must be apologizing for his guest, which made me very uncomfortable at my bad manners, for up to that time I had not been backward in falling to. But as he continued to denounce his unnatural craving for food, and frequently expressed the fear that the meal lacked so much of what I was accustomed to, that I could not possibly make out a comfortable supper, I finally made up my mind he did not mean me at all.

When I had finished he was waiting for me, and we adjourned to the room in which I had played with the children. Lighting a cigar (which he said was a very poor one, but which he observed in the course of the evening, as an example of his extravagance, had cost twenty cents) he took a dressing-gown from a closet, and, putting it on, sat down before me, the picture of luxurious ease.

While we sat there I heard the family of eight, accompanied by their mother and the little old woman who had frightened me, come banging down the stairs, and file into the supper room, where there were a steady noise and wrangle until they had finished and gone up the stairs again. I heard Big Adam protesting to some one that it was not pleasant to be always “jawed at,” and that he did all he could; but when the argument threatened to become boisterous, I heard a pleasanter voice intercede, and establish a peace, and I was sure this was Agnes’s. Mr. Biggs stopped once or twice to listen to the confusion, as if trying to hear what was being said, but recollecting that if he could hear, I could as well, he began talking again to draw my attention from it. He tried to make me believe the children were making the disturbance, and said:—

“There can be no order in a house full of children, and very little comfort.” He stopped to think a moment, but the uproar in the supper room was so great that he went on trying to draw my attention away from it. “I confess to thinking something of them, but every pleasure they bring is accompanied by inconvenience, expense, and annoyance. Have I told you yet that I am a philosopher?”

I had suspected that something was wrong with him, though I could not tell what it was. I replied politely, however, that he had not.

“Well, I am one,” the little man said with a show of pride. “A great many men regard children as blessings. Now I have failed to discover any kind of a blessing or pleasure in being called up in the middle of the night to run for a doctor when there is croup in the house. Usually, too, in such cases the medical man lives a great many miles away, over a rough road. Whenever I go to bed early to make up lost sleep, or come home particularly tired from tossing the hay or holding the plough, either Annie, or Bennie, or Carrie, or Davie, or Effie, or Fannie, or Georgie, or Harry, is sick, and I am compelled to go for a doctor. This never fails if the night is very wet, the roads unusually heavy, or the weather particularly cold. While everybody admires little children, I am sure they would be much more popular if their teeth came more easily; and that there would be a greater demand for them if they did not take a hundred different diseases to which they are not exposed. I am that kind of philosopher.”

The fire in the end of his cigar having about gone out, from holding it in his hand and waving it at me, he revived it with a great deal of puffing, and went on:—

“Understand me, Ned Westlock; I do not complain. I am like other men, except that I am not a fool; and while I accept the bitter with the sweet, I point out the bitter and refuse to call it palatable. I am at a loss to understand, for example, why the Creator is more considerate of pigs than He is of children; for I believe pigs cut their teeth before birth, and seldom die except when fat from good health, and at the hands of a butcher. Children, on the other hand”—he used his right hand to represent the pigs, and his left to represent the children—“are never well, and for every tooth there is an insolent doctor with a bill, to say nothing of measles, coughs, rashes, and fevers. I have seen it estimated that it requires three thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine dollars and thirty-five or forty cents to raise a baby to manhood or womanhood. A pig may be raised to maturity with a few hundred buckets of slop, a few bushels of corn, and a wisp of hay occasionally for a bed. What do you think of that?”