THE “GENERAL STORE”
along in years. He is tall, somewhat stoop-shouldered, and his eyes look quizzically out of narrow slits. His heavy gray mustache dominates his face, the cumbersome ornament suggesting a pair of frayed lambrequins. He lives in a little old-fashioned house that sets back in a yard next his store. A quiet gray-haired woman, with a kindly face, sits sewing in the shade near the back door. They walked to the home of the minister fifteen miles away, to be married, over fifty years ago. They trudged back in the afternoon and began their lives together in the humble frame house that now shows the touch of decay and the scars of winter storms.
THE STOREKEEPER
The small trees that they planted around it have grown tall enough almost to hide the quiet home among their shadows. Little patches of sunlight that have stolen through the leaves are scattered over the roof on bright days, like happy hours in solemn lives.
In a sealed glass jar on a “what-not” in a corner of the front room is a hard queer-looking lump, encrusted with dry mold, a fragment of the wedding cake of half a century ago, which has been faithfully kept and cherished through the years. To the world outside it is meaningless; here it is sacred.
The little things to which sentiment can cling are the anchorages of our hearts. They keep us from drifting too far away, and they call to us when we have wandered. The small piece of wedding cake—gray like the heads of those who reverence it—has helped to prolong the echoes of the chimes of years ago. It was a rough gnarled hand which carefully put the glass jar back into its place after it was shown, but it was a tender and beautiful thought that kept it there.
The old man is now seventy-six. He says that sometimes he is only about thirty, and at other times he is over a hundred—it all depends on the weather and the condition of his rheumatism.
“When I git up in the mornin’,” said he, “I first find out how my rheumatism is, then I take a look at the weather, an’ figger out what kind of a day it’s goin’ to be. If it’s goin’ to rain I let ’er rain, an’ if it ain’t, all well an’ good. Business is pretty slow when it rains, an’ when its ten or fifteen below in the winter, they ain’t no business at all. When it gits like that I hole up like a woodchuck, an’ set in the back part o’ the store in my high-chair, an’ make poetry an’ read. I don’t like to do too much readin’, fer readin’ rots the mind, an’ I’d rather be waitin’ on people comin’ in. Most gen’rally a lot o’ the old cods that live ’round ’ere drop in an’ we talk things over.