There were two doors very near together, and our young adventurer tried the next one. It was quickly opened, and a very slatternly young woman appeared to him with a baby in her arms, and three almost babies hanging to various portions of her dress.
"Does Mr. Smith live here?" queried Tode.
The woman shook her head and slammed the door.
"That's lucky now," soliloquized Tode; "because he does live most everywhere, and I don't want to see him just about now—fact is, it would never do to have them nine babies tumbling into my coffee and getting scalded."
He trudged back to a little weather-worn, tumble-down building on the other side of his new enterprise, and knocked. Such a dear little old fat woman in a bright calico dress, and with a wide white frill to her cap, answered his knock. He chuckled inwardly, and said at once: "I guess you're the woman what's going to let me boil my coffee on your stove, and warm a pie now and then, ain't you?"
"Whatever is the lad talking about?" asked the bewildered old lady.
"Why—" said Tode, conscious that he had made a very unbusiness-like opening, and he begun at the beginning, and told her his story.
"Well now, I never!" said the woman, sinking into a chair. "No, I never did in all my life! And so you left that there place, because you wasn't going to give bottles to your neighbors no longer, and now you're going into business for yourself? Well, well, the land knows I wish there wasn't no bottles to put to 'em—and then they wouldn't be put, you know; and if there's anything I do pray for with all my might and main, next to prayin' that my two boys would let the bottles alone—which I'm afraid they don't, and more's the pity—it's that the bottles will all get clean smashed up one of these days, in His own good time you know."
Tode turned upon her an eager, questioning look.
"Who do you pray to?" he asked, abruptly.