"I—see," said Caleb, departing abruptly, while Doctor Taggess exclaimed:—
"And here I've been practising in some of those bake-ovens of houses for thirty years, and never thought of that very simple means of relief! Good day, Mrs. Somerton; I'll go home and tell my wife what I've heard, then I think I'll read some of the penitential Psalms and some choice bits of Proverbs on the mental peculiarities of fools."
The arbor was completed by dark, and on the next day, and for a fortnight afterward, almost every woman who entered the store was invited to step into the garden and see how well, and yet cheaply, the house was shaded from the sun. All were delighted, though some warned the owner that the shade would kill her vines, whereupon Doctor Taggess, who spent parts of several hours in studying the structure, suggested that if the probable copyists were to set their posts and frameworks securely, they might serve as support for quick-growing hardy vines that might be "set" in the spring of the following year, and clamber all over the skeleton roof before the hottest days came. Thereupon Grace volunteered to write a lot of nursery men to learn what vines, annual or perennial, grew most rapidly and cost least, and to leave the replies in the store for general inspection.
"Doctor," Grace asked during one of the physician's visits of inspection, "where did the settlers of this country come from, that they never think of certain of their own necessities? Don't scold me, please; I'm not going to abuse your darling West; besides, 'tis my West as well as yours, for every interest I have is here. But Eastern farmers and villagers plant shade trees and vines near their houses, unless they can afford to build piazzas,—and perhaps in addition to piazzas. They shade their village streets, too, and many of their highways. Aren't such things the custom in other parts of the United States?"
"They certainly are in my native state, which is Pennsylvania," the Doctor replied, "and some of the handsomest villages and farm-houses I've seen are in Ohio and Kentucky. But I imagine the work was done by the second or third or fourth generation; I don't believe the original settlers could find the time and strength for such effort. As to our people, they came from a dozen or more states—East, West, and Middle, with a few from the South. I honestly believe they're quite as good as the average of settlers of any state, but I shouldn't wonder if you've failed to comprehend at short acquaintance the settler or the farmer class in general. In a new country one usually finds only people who've been elbowed out of older ones, either by misfortune or bad management, or through families having become too large to get a living out of their old homesteads, and with no land near by that was within reach of their pockets. There are as many causes in farming as in any other business for men trying to make a start somewhere else, but a starter in the farming line is always very poor. Almost any family you might name in this county brought itself and all its goods and implements in a single two-horse wagon. Your things, Caleb told me, filled the greater part of a railway car. Quite a difference, eh?"
"Yet most of the things were ours, when we thought ourselves very poor."
"Just so. So you can't imagine the poverty of these people. They lived in their wagons until they had some sort of roof over their heads; a man who could spend a hundred dollars for lumber and nails and window-sash passed for one of the well-to-do class. Some of them had no money whatever; their nearest neighbors would help them put up a log house, but afterward they had to work pretty hard to keep the wolf from the door until they could grow something to eat and to sell. They had hard times, of so many varieties, that now when they are sure of three meals a day, some cows, pigs, and chickens, credit at a store, and a crop in the ground, they think themselves well off, no matter how many discomforts they may have to endure."
"But, Doctor, they're human; they have hearts and feelings."