“Come here and I’ll tell you.”
“You won’t grab her ’thout I say so? an’ you won’t hit me?”
“Not a grab, not a hit,” replied Melville, impressively. He was ostentatiously taking out of a purse three shining quarter-dollars. Then he turned them over and over so that their alluring glitter fell squarely upon little Fritz’s sight. He was not in the least a mercenary child. Quarter-dollars for their own sake might have been spread before him in piles, and he would not have coveted them. But quarter-dollars for “taffy’s” sake—Ah! that was another matter.
“If you was a-going to buy it, where would you go?” he asked, slowly.
“To Mrs. Duncan’s thread-and-needle store, in the village.”
“Pooh! I know better,” retorted the victim of temptation; “you go to candy shops for candy.”
“True; this isn’t a city like Munich, or New York, where you staid that week before you came here with your Uncle Fritz. Up here in the country they keep everything in one shop.”
“Every what thing?” The questioner’s tone was still doubtful.
“Why, just—everything. I can’t make it any plainer. ‘Abry-ham’ buys his shoes there, and his wife her dresses. Grandmother gets her milk-pans there, and there is a candy counter.”
“How do you know? You ain’t never been there.”