“There! Ain’t that good?” sighed Dunham as the band came down the homestretch and wound up the selection in a fine burst of melody.
“I guess there ain’t no doubt but what Wat Mayo is hunky-dory as a musicianer,” agreed Amazeen. “I hear that the Port boys are gittin’ up a band, and they’re even talkin’ of one over to Newry Gore, and are goin’ to have Wat to teach both of ’em. I s’pose it’s all right for him to spend his time that way and earn a dollar, but it don’t seem much like man’s work to me.”
“I s’pose you think the only real bus’ness a man ought to foller is to raise pertaters and fat shotes?” sarcastically observed Dunham. “I tell ye, I admire the Mayo boy’s spunk in makin’ something out of himself instead of a day-labourer. You can’t fit square pegs into round holes. He’s been woke up and put into the job that he fits. Now he’ll amount to some thing. Folks gen’rally amount to something when they git woke up—if it ain’t too late,” he added with a sigh. He snuggled his heap of parcels together on his knees. “I ought to be goin’ home,” he said, half to himself. “But, I swan, I’d like to hear one more tune.”
“You seem to be livin’ pretty well nowadays out to your house,” remarked Uncle Buck, with a sly look at the bundles.
“’Tain’t no more than bringin’ up the gen’ral av’rage, when you think of what we’ve missed to our house,” was Dunham’s stout rejoinder. He was ready nowadays to meet fearlessly the malicious thrusts of his old neighbours, with his new gospel of life.
The music recommenced again across the street. This time the band was playing an accompaniment for a cornet solo by its leader. The notes, dulcet in the distance, seemed almost phrasing a song. Dunham’s eyes moistened with the sudden emotion of his simple nature.
“I know you all have a good deal of fun behind my back about the way I’ve shifted over,” he said, quietly. “I know that it makes you laugh to hear me go ’round preachin’ about gittin’ a little something out of life as you go along. I don’t care if you do laugh. Laugh! The more ye laugh, the less you’ll growl. But me and my wife has woke up, and we don’t care who knows it, and if some of the rest of you would wake up, too, you’d find that the only thing the sun shines for ain’t to raise crops and make freckles.”
“P’raps if all of us could git holt of a ready-made, grown-up daughter, as good as the one you’ve got, we might improve some,” said Buck, with a wink at his associates in “hector.”
“P’raps you could,” Dunham answered, simply and earnestly.
“Well, it makes a pretty good berth for a poor girl, ’Caje,” said a man behind the stove. “Most anyone would like to be adopted into a fam’ly like yours.”