Slowly the more pessimistic of the townspeople began to show interest in the reading-room. Mr. Middler openly expressed his approval of the institution. Mr. Massey, the druggist, reported that the boys behaved themselves "beyond belief!"
At length, even old Elder Concannon appeared unexpectedly in the reading-room one night to see what was going on. He came to criticise and remained to play a game of "draughts," as he called them, with Marty Day himself!
"Them young scalawags, Elder," declared Massey, when the old gentleman dropped into the drug store afterward. "Them young scalawags are certainly surprising me. They behaved themselves more like human bein's than I ever knowed 'em to before. An' it's a nice, neat, warm room, too, ain't it, now?"
"Ahem! It appears to be," admitted Elder Concannon, and not so grudgingly as might have been expected. "But where's that young girl who had so much to do with it at first—where's that Day girl?"
"Why, pshaw, Elder! she don't have nothing to do with the reading-room," and the druggist's eyes twinkled. "Don't you know that she only starts things in this town? She sets folks up in the business of 'doing for themselves'. Then she goes along about her own business.
"What's that? Well, I dunno. I'm wonderin' myself just where she'll break out next!"
CHAPTER XVII
CHRISTMAS NEWS
It bade fair to be an old-fashioned northern New England winter. Janice Day had never seen anything like this in the prairie country from which she had come.
There three or four big storms, the traces of which soon melted, had been considered a "hard" winter. Here in Poketown the hillside was made white before Thanksgiving, and then one snow after another sifted down upon the mountains. Tree branches in the forest broke under the weight of snow. Sometimes she lay awake in the night and heard the frost burst great trees as though a stick of dynamite had been set off inside them.