"What line do you carry? Will you use the sample-room?"
"Don't carry any line. Don't want any sample-room."
He walked out to see the town. It had so much the same look that it seemed to have been embalmed. Here were the old stores, the old signs, apparently the same fly-specked wares in the windows.
He read Doctor Barnby's rusty shingle. Wasn't that the same swaybacked horse dozing at the hitching-post?
Here was the rough hill road where he used to coast as a child. There stood Mrs. Hooker on the lawn with a hose, sprinkling the street, the trees, the grass, the oleander in its tub and the moon-flower on the porch. He seemed to have left her twenty years ago in that attitude with the same arch of water springing from the nozzle.
He paused before the same gap-toothed street-crossing of yore, and he started across it as across the stepping-stones of a dry stream. A raw-boned horse whirled around the corner, just avoiding his toes. It was followed by a bouncing grocery-wagon on the side of whose seat dangled a shirt-sleeved youth who might have been Shelby himself a score of years ago.
Shelby paused to watch. The horse drew up at the home of Doctor Stillwell, the dentist. Before the wagon was at rest the delivery-boy was off and half-way around the side of the house. Mrs. Stillwell opened the screen door to take in the carrots and soap and washing-powder Shelby used to bring her. Shelby remembered that she used washing-powder then. He wondered if she had heard of the "Paradise."
As he hung poised on a brink of memory the screen door flapped shut, the grocery-boy was hurrying back, the horse was moving away, and the boy leaped to his side-saddle seat on the wagon while it was in motion. The delivery-wagons and their Jehus were the only things that moved fast in Wakefield, now as then.
Shelby drifted back to the main street and found the Bon-Ton Grocery where it had been when he deserted the wagon. The same old vegetables seemed to be sprawling outside. The same flies were avid at the strawberry-boxes, which, he felt sure, the grocer's wife had arranged as always, with the biggest on top. He knew that some Mrs. Spate had so distributed them, if it were not the same who had hectored him, for old Spate had a habit of marrying again. His wives lasted hardly so long as his hard-driven horses.
Shelby paused to price some of the vegetables, just to draw Spate into conversation. The old man was all spectacles and whiskers, as he had always been. Shelby thought he must have been born with spectacles and whiskers.