He grinned again broadly. “Walky Dexter says you had the same effect on Polktown as a flea has on a dog. If the flea don’t do nothing else, it keeps the dog stirring!”
“Well, I declare!” exclaimed Janice. “I’m much obliged to Walky, I am sure—comparing me to a flea! I’ll be a bee and sting him next time I get a chance. Here comes Aunt ’Mira. I’m going to help her get breakfast.”
Marty went off, whistling, to help with the chores. His father was already out at the barn. Mrs. Day came heavily into the room—she was almost a giantess of a woman—to find a brightly-burning fire and her niece flitting about, setting the breakfast table.
“I declare for’t, Janice, you are a spry gal,” said the good lady, beginning the preparations for the meal in a capable if not particularly brisk manner. “Ain’t nobody going to get up ahead of you.”
“The sun was ‘up and doing’ before me this morning,” laughed Janice. “And I believe Marty and Uncle Jason were, too. At any rate, they were down before me.”
“It does seem good,” said Aunt ’Mira reflectively, “to come down and find a hot fire in the stove, and water in the bucket. Why, Janice! it never uster be so before you come. I don’t understand it.”
The girl made no reply. For a moment a picture of “the old Day house” and its inmates arose before her mental vision, as it was when first she had come to Polktown from her mid-western home at Greensboro.
The distress she had felt during the first few days of her sojourn with these relatives, who had been utter strangers to her, was not a pleasant thing to contemplate, even at this distance of time.
Until she had taken Daddy’s advice, and put her young shoulder to the local wheel and pushed, Janice Day had been very unhappy. Then her father’s do something spirit had entered into the young girl and she had determined, whether other folk were lazy and lackadaisical or not, that she would go ahead.
Polktown had changed, as Marty said. Slowly but surely it had progressed, and from a very unkempt, slovenly borough, as it was when Janice Day first stepped ashore from the little lake steamer, Constance Colfax, two years before this bright and beautiful summer morning, it had become a clean, orderly and very attractive New England village, with most people doing their best to make the improvement permanent.