"Not necessarily; country people have their special virtues, though many of them have about as little inventive capacity as so many cows. Still, they're great as copyists. For instance, my wife told me that every girl in the county wanted a dress exactly like one you made of two bits of dead-stock calico. They're already copying, I'm glad to say, your brushwood shade for the sides of the house. So, if you'll go right on inventing—"
"But I didn't invent the brushwood shade; you yourself heard Caleb tell me of it."
"Oh, yes, after you'd dragged it out of his memory, where it had been doing nothing for almost a quarter of a century."
"I'm sure I didn't design the combination of calicoes; the idea was far older than the calicoes themselves."
"Perhaps, but you adapted it, as you did Caleb's army hospital shade. Don't ever forget that most so-called inventors, including the very greatest, are principally adapters. 'Tis plain to see that you have the faculty, so don't waste any time in pitying those who haven't; just go on, perceiving and inventing—or adapting, if you prefer to call it so. Try it on everything, from clothes and cookery to religion, and you may depend on most of the people hereabouts to copy you to the full measure of their ability. There! I don't think you'll want to hear the sound of my voice again in a month. Caleb isn't the only man who finds it hard to get off of a hobby."
XIV—FUN WITH A CAMERA
FOR some days after Grace's camera arrived there were many customers and commercial travellers who had to wait for hours to see the one person with whom they preferred to transact business in the store, for a camera is procrastination's most formidable rival in the character of a thief of time. Grace made "snap-shots" at almost everything, and John Henry Bustpodder, the most enterprising of Philip's competitors, took great satisfaction in disseminating the statement that he reckoned the new store-keeper's wife was running to seed, for she'd been seen chasing a whirlwind and trying to shoot it with a black box.
But the Somerton customers regarded the general subject from a different standpoint, for Grace surprised some of them with pictures taken, without their knowledge, of themselves in their wagons, or in front of their houses, or on the way to church. They were not of high quality; but as the best the natives had previously seen were some dreadful tintypes perpetrated annually by a man who frequented county fairs, they were doubly satisfactory, for she would not accept pay for them. She surprised herself, also, sometimes beyond expression, by some of her failures, which were quite as dreadful as anything she had dreamed after almost stepping on snakes—people without heads, or with hands larger than their bodies, or with other faces superimposed upon their own. She also made the full quantity and variety of other blunders peculiar to amateurs, and she stained her finger-tips so deeply that Philip pretended to suspect her of the cigarette habit; but she persisted until she succeeded in getting some pictures which she was not ashamed to send to her aunt and to some of her acquaintances in the city.