Thinking no doubt that an envelope of such imposing dimensions containing such explicit descriptive matter was entitled to the honor of rural free delivery, the postmaster-general himself took off his spectacles, put on a large straw hat and started up the road.
He came presently to a small white house some distance up a lane, where a dog with a collar greeted him with a cordial wag of the tail.
That dog, in his humble abode, did not know that his fame had gone abroad and that his personal distinction of a collar was known in the sovereign commonwealth of New Jersey, not to mention the vast cosmopolitan centre of Bridgeboro, county seat so-called, because of the comfortable propensity of the people living there to spend their time sitting down. Perhaps it might more appropriately have been called the county couch, since the inhabitants were said to be forever in a kind of doze.
But if Bridgeboro, New Jersey, dozed, Hicksville, North Carolina, had the sleeping sickness. And it did not even walk in its sleep for not a soul was to be seen about the little white house nor anywhere else.
There was no doubt, however, of its being the house in question. A pillar at the end of the porch had rotted away and the roof over the little platform was tumbling down. A pane of glass was missing from the sitting room window.
But Joshua Hicks was not going to take any chances. So he playfully ruffled the dog’s hair to make sure that the collar was around the animal’s neck and having satisfied himself of this he strolled around in back of the house for an official inspection of the puddle or the pail. The United States government must be very thorough about these things; puddles especially....
There, sure enough, was the puddle, a perennial puddle, fed by a laughing, babbling, leaky drainpipe. Joshua Hicks dipped a finger in the mud and made sure of the puddle. He then looked for the pail, and not seeing it, put on his steel spectacles and glanced again at the envelope.
“A puddle or a pail,” he said. “I reckon that’s all right; it says or a pail.”
He was going to knock on the kitchen door, but he bethought him to make a supplementary inspection of the tumbled down porch roof. There could be no two opinions about that; even a profiteering landlord would have admitted the condition. And finally Postmaster Hicks satisfied himself in the best of all ways of the condition of the window, and that was by cutting his finger on a fragment of broken glass.
Staunch and true as he was, he was ready to shed his blood for his country.