“I believe Tom Hammond would have proposed to me. If he had, what should I have replied?”
A far-away look crept into her eyes. She was back again in the little town where she had been “reared,” as she herself would have said. We have many villages in England larger, more populous, more busy, than her “town,” but, then, the people of her land talk “big.”
Before her mind’s eye there rose the picture of her father’s store, a huge, rambling concern built of wood, with a frontage of a hundred feet, and a colonnade of turned wooden pillars that supported a verandah that ran the whole length.
Every item of the interior of the store came vividly before her mind, the very odour of the place—a curious blend of groceries, drapery, rope, oils and colours, tobacco,—seemed suddenly to fill her nostrils. And in that instant, though she scarcely realized it, the first real touch of nostalgia came to her.
She saw the postal section of the store littered with men, all smoking, most of them yarning. One after another dropped in, and, with a “Howdy, all?” dropped upon a coil of white cotton rope, or lounged against a counter or cask. “Dollars” and “cents” floated in speech all around, while the men waited for the mail. It was late that night.
A week before she had sailed for England, she had gone down to the store, as she had gone every evening about mail-time, and, entering at the end nearest her home, she had come upon the scene that had now so suddenly risen before her mind’s eye. She had traversed all the narrow alley-way between the stored-up supplies, from which the various departments were stocked, singing as she went:
“The world is circumbendibus,
We’re all going round;
We have a try to fly the sky,
But still we’re on the ground.