“I suppose this is a free country,” remarked the boy, rising to rest his back.
“Oh, my, yes,” returned the other; “if she’s pleased, I’m quite agreeable. And—I don’t know, too—I dare say she’s gettin’ pretty well along. Maybe she thinks they ain’t any too much time to lose, and is making a grab at what comes handiest. Still, I should ’a’ thought she could ’a’ done better than Dwight. I worked with him for a spell once, you know.”
There seemed to be very few people with whom Newton Shull had not at one time or another worked. Apparently there was no craft or calling which he did not know something about. The old phrase, “Jack of all trades,” must surely have been coined in prophecy for him. He had turned up in Octavius originally, some years before, as the general manager of a “Whaler’s Life on the Rolling Deep” show, which was specially adapted for moral exhibitions in connection with church fairs. Calamity, however, had long marked this enterprise for its own, and at our village its career culminated under the auspices of a sheriff’s officer. The boat, the harpoons, the panorama sheet and rollers, the whale’s jaw, the music-box with its nautical tunes—these were sold and dispersed. Newton Shull remained, and began work as a mender of clocks. Incidentally, he cut out stencil-plates for farmers to label their cheese-boxes with, and painted or gilded ornamental designs on chair-backs through perforated paper patterns. For a time he was a maker of children’s sleds. In slack seasons he got jobs to help the druggist, the tinsmith, the dentist, or the Town Clerk, and was equally at home with each. He was one of the founders of the Octavius Philharmonics, and offered to play any instrument they liked, though his preference was for what he called the bull fiddle. He spoke often of having travelled as a bandsman with a circus. We boys believed that he was quite capable of riding a horse bareback as well.
When Marsena Pulford, then, decided that he must have some help, Newton Shull was obviously the man. How the arrangement came to take the form of a partnership was never explained, save on the conservative village theory that Marsena must have reasoned that a partner would be safer with the cash-box downstairs, while he was taking pictures upstairs, than a mere hired man. More likely it grew out of their temperamental affinity. Shull was also a man of grave and depressed moods (as, indeed, is the case with all who play the bass viol), only his melancholy differed from Marsena’s in being of a tirelessly garrulous character. This was not always an advantage. When customers came in, in the afternoon, it was his friendly impulse to engage them in conversation at such length that frequently the light would fail altogether before they got upstairs. He recognized this tendency as a fault, and manfully combated it—leaving the reception-room with abruptness at the earliest possible moment, and talking to the boy in the work-room instead.
Mr. Shull was a short, round man, with a beard which was beginning to show gray under the lip. His reception-room manners were urbane and persuasive to a degree, and he particularly excelled in convincing people that the portraits of themselves, which Marsena had sent down to him in the dummy to be dried and varnished, and which they hated vehemently at first sight, were really unique and precious works of art. He had also much success in inducing country folks to despise the cheap ferrotype which they had intended to have made, and to venture upon the costlier ambrotype, daguerreotype, or even photograph instead. If they did not go away with a family album or an assortment of frames that would come in handy as well, it was no fault of his.
He made these frames himself, on a bench which he had fitted up in the work-room. Here he constructed show-cases, too, cut out mats and mounts, and did many other things as adjuncts to the business, which honest Marsena had never dreamed of.
“Yes,” he went on now, “I carried a chain for Dwight the best part o’ one whole summer, when he was layin’ levels for that Nedahma Valley Railroad they were figurin’ on buildin’. Guess they ruther let him in over that job—though he paid me fair enough. It ain’t much of a business, that surveyin’. You spend about half your time in findin’ out for people the way they could do things if they only had the money to do ’em, and the other half in settlin’ miserable farmers’ squabbles about the boundaries of their land. You’ve got to pay a man day’s wages for totin’ round your chain and axe and stakes—and, as like as not, you never get even that money back, let alone any pay for yourself. I know something about a good many trades, and I say surveyin’ is pretty nigh the poorest of ’em all.”
“George Washington was a surveyor,” commented the boy, stooping down to his task once more.
“Yes,” admitted Mr. Shull; “so he was, for a fact. But then he had influence enough to get government jobs. I don’t say there ain’t money in that. If Dwight, now, could get a berth on the canal, say, it ’ud be a horse of another color. They say, there’s some places there that pay as much as $3 a day. That’s how George Washington got his start, and, besides, he owned his own house and lot to begin with. But you’ll take notice that he dropped surveyin’ like a hot potato the minute there was any soldierin’ to do. He knew which side his bread was buttered on!”
“Well,” said the boy, slapping the last plates sharply into the tub, “that’s just what Dwight’s doin’ too, ain’t it?”