"Well, you're a storekeeper, I want some bread and some butter, and anything else you've got that doesn't need to be cooked."
"Are you hungry?"
I told him I was, and he determined to be more charitable than I had given him the name for.
"Well," said he, "I can let you have a slice of bread and butter and a cup of cawfee I dessay."
"Thanks. I should like to buy a loaf of bread and a quarter pound of butter all the same," said I.
"We haven't any bread in the store. The baker leaves it three times a week, and we've only enough for ourselves; but I can let you have a slice, and that'll keep you going till you get to Unityville. It's only about two miles away. There's a hotel there. The folks have taken away the keeper's licence, and you won't be able to get anything to drink. But he'll take you in for a dollar. You'll get all you want. In half an hour you'll be there. There are two more big hills, and then you're there."
He brought the bread, and as I was ravenous I was tamed thereby, and I thanked him. The bread and butter and coffee were gratis. He was really a kindly man. I shouldn't wonder if his wife had an acid temperament. The night's lodging, no doubt, depended more on her than on him.
I sat on rolls of wire-netting outside the store and finished the little meal. Then I went away. Over the hills in the dusk! It was real colonial weather; the light of kerosene lamps streamed through the downpour of rain, the dark woods on each side of the strange high road grew more mysterious and lonesome, silent except for the throbbing of the rain on the leaves and on the ground. I stopped at a house to ask the way, but when I knocked no one answered. I looked through the kitchen window at the glow of the fire and at the family round the well-spread table, and the farmer's wife directed me through the glass.
At last—in a flow of liquid mud, as if arrested in floating down-hill—a miserable town and a hotel.
When I asked the host to put me up he said his wife had gone to bed with a headache, and if I had not rated him soundly I should have been turned into the rain once again.