Eli | Page 9

Mr. Eldridge, a little hotly, and he arose, and left him.
The jurymen broke up into little knots, tilted their chairs back, and settled into the easiest positions that their cramped quarters allowed. Most of them lit their pipes; the captain, and one or two whom he honored, smoked fragrant cigars, and the room was soon filled with a dense cloud.
Eli sat alone by the window.
"Sometimes sell two at one house," said a lank book-agent, arousing himself from a reverie; "once sold three."
"I think the Early Rose is about as profitable as any," said a little farmer, with a large circular beard. "I used to favor Jacobs's Seedling, but they have n't done so well with me of late years."
"Sometimes," said the book-agent, picking his teeth with a quill, "you 'll go to a house, and they 'll say they can't be induced to buy a book of any kind, historical, fictitious, or religious; but you just keep on talking, and show the pictures--'Grant in Boyhood,' 'Grant a Tanner,' Grant at Head-quarters,' 'Grant in the White House,' 'Grant before Queen Victoria,' and they warm up, I tell you, and not infrequently buy."
"Do you sell de 'Illustrated Bible'," asked Washington, "wid de Hypocrypha?"
"No; I have a more popular treatise--the 'Illustrated History of the Bible.' Greater variety. Brings in the surrounding nations, in costume. Cloth, three dollars; sheep, three-fifty; half calf, five-seventy-five; full morocco, gilt edges, seven-fifty. Six hundred and seven illustrations on wood and steel. Three different engravings of Abraham alone. Four of Noah,--'Noah before the Flood,' 'Noah Building the Ark,' 'Noah Welcoming the Dove,' 'Noah on Ararat,' Steel engraving of Ezekiel's Wheel, explaining prophecy. Jonah under the gourd, Nineveh in the distance."
Mr. Eldridge and Captain Thomas had drifted into a discussion of harbors, and the captain had drawn his chair up to the table, and, with a cigar in his mouth, was explaining an ingeniously constructed foreign harbor. He was making a rough sketch, with a pen.
"Here is north," he said; "here is the coastline; here are the flats; here are the sluicegates; they store the water here, in--"
Some of the younger men had their heads together, in a corner, about the tin-pedler, who was telling stories of people he had met in his journeys, which brought out repeated bursts of laughter.
In the corner farthest from Eli, a delicate-looking man began to tell the butcher about Eli's wife.
"Twelve years ago this fall," he said, "I taught district-school in the parish where she lived. She was about fourteen then. Her father was a poor farmer, without any faculty. Her mother was dead, and she kept house. I stayed there one week, boarding 'round."
"Prob'ly did n't git not much of any fresh meat that week," suggested the butcher.
"She never said much, but it used to divert me to see her order around her big brothers, just as if she was their mother. She and I got to be great friends; but she was a queer piece. One day at school the girls in her row were communicating, and annoying me, while the third class was reciting in 'First Steps in Numbers,' and I was so incensed that I called Lizzie--that's her name--right out, and had her stand up for twenty minutes. She was a shy little thing, and set great store by perfect marks. I saw that she was troubled a good deal, to have all of them looking and laughing at her. But she stood there, with her hands folded behind her, and not a smile or a word."
"Look out for a sullen cow," said the butcher.
"I felt afraid I had been too hasty with her, and I was rather sorry I had been so decided--although, to be sure, she did n't pretend to deny that she had been communicating."
"Of course," said the butcher: "no use lyin' when you 're caught in the act."
"Well, after school, she stayed at her desk, fixing her dinner-pail, and putting her books in a strap, and all that, till all the rest had gone, and then she came up to my desk, where I was correcting compositions."
"Now for music!" said the butcher.
"She had been crying a little. Well, she looked straight in my face, and said she, 'Mr. Pollard, I just wanted to say to you that I was n't doing anything at all when you called me up;' and off she went. Now, that was just like her,--too proud to say a word before the school."
But here his listener's attention was diverted by the voice of the book-agent.
"The very best Bible for teachers, of course, is the limp-cover, protected edges, full Levant morocco, Oxford, silk-sewed, kid-lined, Bishop's Divinity Circuit, with concordance, maps of the Holy Land, weights, measures, and money-tables of the Jews. Nothing like having a really--"
"And so," said the captain, moving back his