A loud noise struck her ear, and she dropped the end of the big bag, out of which she was getting some potatoes for dinner and stopped to listen. There it was again.
“Oh, my goodness me!” Polly gave a merry little laugh, “It’s at the door,” and dropping the tin pan she had brought for the potatoes, she skipped nimbly over the big bag. “P’raps it’s somebody come to call;” for Polly dearly loved to be elegant, and nothing could have been so truly magnificent as to have callers in their very best clothes come and rap at the old green door. She had often imagined how they would look. And now, “Perhaps—just perhaps,” she thought, as she skipped along over the rickety steps leading up to the kitchen, “that there is one really and truly come to see us!”
She raced through the kitchen and threw open the old door, the color flying up to her brown hair, and her eyes sparkling. A man was standing on the old flat stone, and pressed up close to the green door.
“Oh, Mr. Beggs!” cried Polly, the color dropping all out of her cheek in her disappointment. He wasn’t a caller, not a bit of it, only the ragman who drove through Badgertown once in a while, and collected the rags and old bottles at the houses. And in return he gave tinware of every description and brooms and wooden pails. There, off by the old gate, was his big red cart, waiting in the road.
“Yes, I’ve come.” Mr. Beggs pushed back his flapping straw hat from his forehead, and pulling out a big red cotton handkerchief from the pocket of his much-worn linen coat that flapped around his legs, he wiped his forehead vigorously. “Call’ated your Ma was ready maybe to trade to-day.”
“We don’t have many rags, Mr. Beggs,” said Polly, stifling her disappointment. “You know Mamsie told you not to trouble to stop often because—”
“I know—I know,” said Mr. Beggs, interrupting. Then he leaned against the door-casing to rest on one foot while he talked. “But then I alwus d’rather stop, for you might get ready to trade. An’ tain’t no trouble to me, cause it rests th’ horse. Is the boys to home?”
“No,” said Polly, “they went off to dig flag-root.”
“Pshaw, now.” The ragman pushed the old straw hat farther off from his head till it began to look like a new background for it. “Why couldn’t they have dug flag-root any other day, pray tell,” he exclaimed in vexation; “I was a-goin’ to take ’em to ride on my cart.”
“O dear me!” exclaimed Polly, just as much distressed, and clasping her hands, “now, isn’t that too bad, Mr. Beggs!”