boys, for she was a sensible woman, but it gave him a prestige on the
playground that he was not slow to take. He was a born trader; and he
kept what he got and got more. His weakness was music. He kept two
cows in his herd in the summer time in return for the use of the
melodeon at the Thayer House, and moved it to his own home and put it
in the crowded little room, and practised on it at night when the
other boys were loafing at the town pump. For a consideration in
marbles he taught Buck Culpepper the chords in "G" on the guitar, and
for further consideration taught him the chords in "D" and "C," and
with the aid of Jimmy Fernald, aged nine, and Molly Culpepper, aged
eleven, one with a triangle and the other with a pumpkin reed pipe,
John organized his Band, which he led with his mouth-organ, and
exhibited in Culpepper's barn, appropriating to himself as the
director the pins charged at the door. Forty years afterward, when
Molly called his attention to his failure to divide with the children,
John Barclay smiled as he lifted his lame foot to a fat leather chair
in front of him and said, "That was what we call the promoter's
profit." And then the talk ran to Ellen, and John opened his great
desk and from a box without a mark on it he brought out a tintype
picture of Ellen at fourteen, a pink-cheeked child in short sleeves,
with the fringe of her pantalets showing above her red striped
stockings and beneath her bulging skirts, and with a stringy, stiff
feather rising from the front of her narrow-rimmed hat.

During the time when he was going to school by day and working
evenings and caring for the town herd through the summer, the war was
dragging wearily on. Sometimes a soldier came home on a furlough and
there was news of the Sycamore Ridge men, but oftener it was a season
of waiting and working. The women and children cared for the farms and
the stores as best they could and lived, heaven only knows how, and