“Just the thing! My dear young friend, the hand of Providence is in this matter. Your worthy employer was the chairman of our meeting last night; certainly he will be glad to give you such assistance as shall lessen the amount of your labors. Here he comes now. Let me manage this affair; I really ask it as a favor.”
“I’m much obliged, but I think—confound it!” ejaculated the young man, as his companion hastened out of earshot and buttonholed Squire Tomple. Half smiling and half frowning Doughty retired from the door, but took up a new position, from which he could see the couple. To the eyes of the clerk, his employer seemed a rock in his unchanging pose, while the old preacher, rich in many a grace not peculiar to country storekeepers, yet utterly ignorant of business and such of its perversions as are called requirements, seemed a mere lamb—a fancy which was strengthened by the incessant gesturing and change of position in which he indulged when in conversation. The pair soon separated; the minister walked away, his step seeming not so exultant as when he approached the merchant; while the latter, appearing to his clerk to be broader, deeper, and more solid than ever, approached the store, lifted up his head, displayed the face he usually wore when he found he had made a bad debt, and said,
“George, I wish you wouldn’t try to talk about business to ministers. Old Wedgewell has just pestered me nearly to death; says you complain of having too much to do, and that you have to drink to keep up. It’ll be just like him to tell somebody else, and a pretty story that’ll be to go around about the chairman of a temperance meeting.”
“I didn’t mean to say anything to him,” replied the clerk; “but he made me drop a shutter on my toes, and I guess that loosened my tongue a little. I didn’t tell him anything but the truth, though, Squire. I signed the pledge, last night, hoping you’d help me through.”
“What—what do you mean, George?” asked the merchant, in a tone which defined the word “conservative” more clearly than lexicographer ever did.
“I can’t work so many hours a day without drinking sometimes,” replied the clerk. “What I ask of you is to take a boy. If I could come in a couple of hours later every morning—and there’s next to nothing done in the first two hours of the day—I could have a decent amount of rest, not have to hurry so much, and wouldn’t break down so often, and have to go to whisky to be helped up again.”
“A boy would have to be paid,” remarked the Squire in the tone he habitually used when making a penitential speech in class-meeting; “and here’s summer-time coming; there isn’t much business done in summer, you know.”
“A boy won’t cost more than a dollar a week the first year,” replied the clerk, “and you’d make that out of the people who sometimes have to go somewhere else and trade on days when you’re not here and I’m too busy to wait on them. There isn’t so much money made in summer; but women come to the store then a good deal more than they do in the winter, and they take up an awful amount of time. Besides, the store has to be opened about two hours earlier every morning than it does in winter.”
The merchant pinched his gloomy brow and reflected. Doughty looked at him without much hopefulness. The Squire’s heart might be all right, but his pocket-book was by far the more sensitive and controlling organ. At last the Squire said,
“Well, if it’s for your good that you want the boy, you ought to be willing to pay his salary. Besides——”