Joel Bell proved illusive—Mary said perhaps he was a diving bell. At last they found some one who could tell them where to go, and they made the last stage of the journey carefully, for it was a neighbourhood perfectly capable of throwing tire-wrecking substances into the road. Joel Bell proved to be a melancholy person. His melancholy was justified when it developed that his wife had died some months ago, leaving him with three small Bells to be taken care of and provided for. The trouble was that poor Joel could not provide for them, if he took care of them, for earning money and staying at home were not compatible.
“I know a real smart girl, young, but old enough to take care of children like mine—the baby’s most two—if I could afford to hire her, but I can’t, so what’m I to do?” he demanded. “There ought to be some place in Vineclad where you could dump little children while you worked, same’s I hear tell of elsewhere.”
“A Baby Dump, sometimes called a Day Nursery! There’s our Object!” cried Jane, stretching her slender neck backward to make Mary hear.
“Are there enough people here who would use such a place, Mr. Bell?” asked Mary, leaning over the door of the car with her sympathetic eyes on Joel Bell’s melancholy face.
“’Round here they is,” he said, looking at Mary with the frankest admiration. “There’s a mill right near here; lots of folks work in it, men and women; they’d get on better if they had some such dumpin’ place to leave their babies. An’ a kind of a dispensation would be good, run along with it.”
“A dispensation? From school? The children wouldn’t be old enough for that,” said Win, feeling his way toward enlightenment.
“Land, no! I don’t see what you mean,” said Joel Bell, mystified in his turn. “A dispensation where they’d get medicine free, an’ maybe a doctor’s overhaulin’.”
“Oh, of course! Why didn’t we think of that?” cried Mary hastily, afraid Win would heedlessly correct Joel and tell him that he had meant to say dispensary.
“Well, well!” Mrs. Garden cried impatiently, having no clue to why this need of the neighbourhood should interest her three girls as it did. “All this is quite wide of the mark! We came to offer you a position in my employ, my good man. I am told that you know enough of gardening to be useful to us, and, if possible, I want you to learn to drive this car. Get the young girl you spoke of to look after your children, and you will find yourself much better off than you have been, I’ll warrant.”
“Dear me, if madrina only wouldn’t call Abbie ‘my good woman!’ and this man ‘my good man!’ I’m sure they hate it,” thought Mary, aghast at this imperative manner of dealing with the difficult native American temperament.