"Oh, we're agoing to do it all, this evening," cried Bill, defiantly. "You promised that we could clean out that box of cuts. You promised a long time ago."
"Go to it," said Ellis, his voice relaxing, and the two boys bolted into the back room. A little later he joined them. Jap and Bill sat on the floor, blowing the dust from a lot of dirty old woodcuts.
"I bought them with the job," he said, turning the pile over with his foot. He sat down on the emptied box and watched them as they examined the cuts.
"What is this?" asked Jap, peering at the largest block in the lot.
"That is a cut of the town, as it was when I came here," said Ellis, a shadow of reminiscence crossing his face, as he took the block in his long fingers.
Bill drew himself to his knees and looked at the maze of lines and depressions curiously. The picture was as strange to him as it was to Jap. Ellis continued:
"There were three business houses here, besides the blacksmith shop and the saloon. Here they are. Ezra Bowers, Bill's grandfather, with the help of his three sons, ran a general store where they sold everything from castor oil to mowing machines. Phineas Blome—an unmistakable son of old Jerusalem—sold clothing and more castor oil and mowing machines. There wasn't such a thing as a butcher shop in Bloomtown. When the natives wanted fresh meat, they ordered it brought out on the hack. In other parts of the world, that institution is sometimes called a stage; but here I learned that its right name is 'hack.' The southern terminus of the Bloomtown, Barton and Faber hack-line, that has done its best for thirty years to prevent us from being entirely marooned, was over there at the south side of Blome's Park, exactly as it is to-day. The hotel didn't have a bit more paint, the first night I slept in it, than it has now."
"Flossy said that weathered shingles were fashionable," Bill grinned, taking up another cut. "Here's the Public Square—you call it Blome's Park, but I never heard anybody else call it that," he added, his voice lifting in a note of query. "That's the Square, all right, and the Town Hall, with 'leven horses hitched in front of it."
"Yes, when old man Blome laid out his farm in town lots, he reserved his woods pasture for a city park. You never heard of an orthodox town that didn't begin with a Public Square, and that little rocky glade with the wet-weather spring had the only trees within ten miles of here. It wasn't fit for farming, so Blome argued that nobody would buy it with a view to raising garden truck. But your foxy Uncle Blome didn't sacrifice anything by his generosity to the town that was about to be born. He reserved the lots facing the park on three sides, and held them at an exorbitant figure—as much as five dollars a front foot, I should say.
"The lots at the north and east were to be sold for high-class residences only. Those at the west were reserved for business houses. Behold the embryo Main street! Overlooking the park at the south was Blome's farm house, since metamorphosed into a tavern and barns for the stage horses. The last of the Blomes shook the dust of Bloomtown from his feet when Carter bought his interest in the hack line. Bill's grandfather had a farm adjoining Blome's land at the west; but Ezra Bowers, merchant prince and attorney-at-law," he said whimsically, "had to have a residence in the fashionable quarter, fronting the park. A little patch of the old farm is quite good enough for Mr. and Mrs. Ellis Hinton and their two sons, Jap and Jasper William."