ward his fringed and weather-beaten neck, and peered over the brambles. “What is’t ye got thar—straddle-bug?” He came still nearer, and looked at the spider. “Wa’al, darn my pictur ef ’tain’t an old yeller-belly! P’r’aps you don’t know that them critters is pizen. Why, Eben Sanford’s gal got all chawed up by one on ’em. Great Sneezer!” he exclaimed, taking three or four strides backward, with both hands uplifted. I had merely raised my hand and gently smoothed the spider.
“Wa’al,” he continued, “yen kin rub ’em daown ef yeu pleze; but fer my part, I’d ruther keep off abaout a good spittin’ distance”—which was the Shoopegg way of expressing a length of about fifteen feet. Amos was crossing lots for his “caow,” he said; but in spite of his plea that the “old heiffer” was “bellerin’” like “Sam Hill,” and was “gittin’ ’tarnal on-easy,” I made him tarry sufficiently long to enable me to send him off a wiser man.
Amos Shoopegg is a type of a large class of the native element of Hometown. Of course, “Shoopegg” is not his actual name. In the long line of his prided Puritan ancestry no one ever bore it before him. This is only an affectionate epithet given him by the village boys full twenty years ago, and it has stuck to him closer than a brother ever since, as those festive surnames always do. Nominally, Amos was a farmer. In summer he was one in fact, and could swing off as pretty a swath in haying as any man in town. But in the winter he changed his vocation, and became a disciple of the “waxed-end.” All day long he could be seen, closeted with a little red-hot stove, plying his trade in his small, square shop, up near the old red school-house. Here he pounded on the big lapstone on his knees, or, with strap and foot-stick in position, punched and tugged around the edge of those marvellous brogans. He made slings and leather “suckers” for the boys, and furnished them with all the black-wax they could chew—or stow-away, to stick between the lining of their pockets. And the huge wooden shoe-pegs that he drove beneath his hammer were a sight to behold. The man who used his “cheap line of goods” might verily say he walked upon a wood-pile.
So they dubbed him “Shoe-peg,” or “Shoop” for brevity. There are others among his neighbors who would furnish an inexhaustible source of study to the student of character. There’s old Rufus Fairchild, known as “Roof,” a rotund specimen of rural jollity, his round face set in dishevelled locks of gray, with a twinkle in his eye and a good word for everybody. And there’s Father Tomlinson, who keeps the post-office down by the dam, as genial an old fellow as ever wrapped up his throat in a white stock. And I might almost continue the list indefinitely. But there is one I must especially mention; and, now that I think of it, he really should have headed the list, for he stands alone—or at least he does sometimes. If you are in search of the embodiment of typical Erin, you need go no farther; here he is. This individual represents another nationality which swells the population of Hometown—the hard-working laborers who toil in the great factory down in the glen, called “Satan’s Misery.” The above personage is one of the best-hearted creatures in the town; but it is the old story, and the world to him is enclosed in the compass of a barrel-hoop. When last I saw him he was in an evident decline, but as I put my finger on his wrist I could still feel the pulsations of the whiskey coursing through his veins.
“Look here, my good fellow,” I said to him one day, “why don’t you taper off a little? If you keep on in this way, you’ll be in your grave in less than a month. How would you like that?”
“Arrah, begorra,” he replied, with a look of hopeful resignation, “if I cud awnly be shure o’ me gude skvare dthrink in the other wurrld, oi wudn’t moind.”
The record of a single evening spent in the village store, with its rural jargon and homespun yarns, its odd vernacular and rustic gossip, would make a volume as rare and unique as the characters it would depict.
The store itself is a matchless picture in its way, and for variety in accessory is as rich as could be wished for. The low, murky ceiling, hung with all manner of earthly goods—scythes and rakes, boots and pails, in pendulous array; bottles and boxes, brooms and breast-pins, are here—in short, everything that heart could wish or thought suggest, from speckled calicoes to seven-cent sugar, or from a three-tined fork to a goose-yoke. Evening after evening, for an hour or so, I was tempted thither, until I found the week had gone. Sunday came again—Sunday in New England. The old bell swung on its wheel in the belfry, ringing out its call to devotion, and ere the echo had died in the recesses of the mountain beyond the still atmosphere reverberated with an answering peal from the little sister church in the valley below, as the scattered groups with strolling steps wend their way to “meeting,” and the gay loads from Newborough go flitting by on the accustomed Sunday drive.
Monday dawned on Hometown. It found me up and doing. I had enjoyed one week of glorious loafing, but work was the programme for the next. I went to Draper’s Inn and engaged a horse and buggy “until further notice.” “A spang-up team” he called it, and it would be up “in half a jiffy.” We were waiting for it when it came, and what with our variety of luggage in the shape of canvases, color-boxes, hammocks, camp-seats, and easels, every bit of available space in that buggy was well utilized. Before the clock has struck nine, we are spinning along down through the village, now past the store, now over the bridge, and turning to the right, we glide by the little post-office, as the kind face of Father Tomlinson nods a “good-bye” from the door-way.