factory at the station, but before the time of our coming they had both
gone out of business. In the morning and in the evening busses came
down to the station along a road called Turner's Pike from the hotel on
the main street of Bidwell. Our going to the out of the way place to
embark in the restaurant business was mother's idea. She talked of it
for a year and then one day went off and rented an empty store building
opposite the railroad station. It was her idea that the restaurant
would be profitable. Travelling men, she said, would be always waiting
around to take trains out of town and town people would come to the
station to await incoming trains. They would come to the restaurant to
buy pieces of pie and drink coffee. Now that I am older I know that she
had another motive in going. She was ambitious for me. She wanted me to
rise in the world, to get into a town school and become a man of the
towns.

At Pickleville father and mother worked hard as they always had done.
At first there was the necessity of putting our place into shape to be
a restaurant. That took a month. Father built a shelf on which he put
tins of vegetables. He painted a sign on which he put his name in large
red letters. Below his name was the sharp command--"EAT HERE"--that was
so seldom obeyed. A show case was bought and filled with cigars and
tobacco. Mother scrubbed the floor and the walls of the room. I went to
school in the town and was glad to be away from the farm and from the
presence of the discouraged, sad-looking chickens. Still I was not very
joyous. In the evening I walked home from school along Turner's Pike
and remembered the children I had seen playing in the town school yard.
A troop of little girls had gone hopping about and singing. I tried
that. Down along the frozen road I went hopping solemnly on one leg.
"Hippity Hop To The Barber Shop," I sang shrilly. Then I stopped and
looked doubtfully about. I was afraid of being seen in my gay mood. It