I think Octavia felt vaguely comforted, in spite of her sincere and hearty desire for my success, to find that sausages could be treated as badly as manuscripts!
But we at length found a firm that had heard of Groundnut Hill farm products and I immediately received an order for the sausages which I proposed to make. It was thought certain that something really “gilt-edged,” with the Groundnut Hill brand upon it, would sell. The man, rosy and good-natured, a typical butcher, who represented the firm, suggested sausage cakes and hogs’-head-cheese—at which Octavia made a little move.
I assented eagerly. Leander Green had a cousin with “a talent for hogs’-head-cheese,” as Leander had proudly boasted, a talent now lying fallow in the horse-clipping business. I foresaw the building up of a great business and my heart leaped for joy.
“Palmyra?” remarked the clerk, who took my address, in an aside to his superior. “Isn’t that where one of the designs came from for the old man’s yacht? Some o’ them shipbuildin’ towns.”
The others had wandered off to look at the beautiful display of vegetables and fruit in another part of the market. I listened with my heart in my mouth.
“A drawing?” I faltered, interrogatively.
“Old Mr. Salter—Solomon Salter—that owns a good part of the market, he’s building himself a yacht, and none of the designs that the big fellows made appeared to suit him. He’s a man that’s got ideas of his own about most things. So he advertised for a design. Seems he got one from somewheres down your way. I don’t know much about it; he told Pollard something about it. Pollard, he’s been a sailor and calculates he knows all about navigation.”
“Are you sure that it was from Palmyra?” I asked nervously, addressing myself to the clerk.
Pollard was not by any means sure; he repeated vaguely that it was “one o’ them shipbuildin’ towns.” It was ’long in the winter that the old man told him about it; he had a stack of drawin’s as high as the Old South meetin’ house steeple. There seemed to be consid’able many folks drawin’ pictures of one kind and another nowadays; he expected a good many done it to get rid of stiddy day’s works. When you come to think that only one of the fellers that made them drawin’s was goin’ to get the designin’ of the old man’s yacht the designin’ business didn’t look very encouragin’. He happened to notice Palmyra—yes, it was Palmyra—because a nephew of his run his schooner ashore there once. But the old man was liberal; he’d pay—he’d pay when he did get what suited him and he could afford to.
The clerk was talkative but his information was not definite. I hurried after the others, trying to dismiss from my mind the idea that had seized upon it when the man said that a design had come from Palmyra. But it was so evident to me that I shouldn’t succeed in forgetting it that I turned back and asked him where Mr. Solomon Salter might be found. It was bold, but I felt that I had now the dignity of a business woman to support me.