One winter, when you were a little chap, my shipper got the grippe and was out for three months. I wished his job on Charlie, and Charlie made good although you never would have thought so from the length of his face. Our shipments were sent out on time, well packed, and properly routed, but Charlie was as doleful as a rejected suitor at a pretty girl's wedding.
There wasn't a day, he didn't come in and spill gloom all over my office, prophesying that soon every thing would go wrong. Nothing happened though, so I used to laugh at him, and tell him to forget it.
Early in February, I was due to make a big shipment of shoes to a jobbers' warehouse on or before March first.
Everything had gone smoothly. I'd had no labor troubles, had bought my stock right, and stood to make a nice juicy profit, for on the first day of February all the shoes were in cases in the shipping room, ready to start on their journey to Chicago.
On the night of the second, it started to snow, for three days it came down in perfect clouds burying Lynn four feet deep.
For three days traffic was completely stalled, for although the snow was wet and sticky when the storm started, along in the afternoon of the second day, it turned cold, with the result that the whole mass turned into ice, and made it impossible to clear the streets.