Janice Day at Poketown | Page 6

before. This was an emergency that floored him.
"Why! isn't that the expressman there? And can't he take my trunk right
up to the house?" continued the girl.
"Ya-as; that's Walky Dexter," admitted Mr. Day.
A stout, red-faced man was backing a raw-boned nag in front of a farm
wagon, down upon the wharf and toward a little heap of baggage that
had been run ashore from the lower deck of the Constance Colfax.
Janice, still lugging her suitcase, shot up the dock toward the
expressman, leaving Jason, slack-jawed and well-nigh breathless.
"Jefers-pelters! What a flyaway critter she is!" the man muttered. "I
don't see whatever we're a-goin' to do with her."
Meanwhile Janice got Mr. Dexter's attention immediately. "There's my
trunk right there, Mr. Dexter," she cried. "And here's the check. You
see it--the brown trunk with the brass corners?"
"I see it, Miss. All right. I'll git it up to Jason's some time this
arternoon."
"Oh, Mr. Dexter!" she cried, shaking her head at him, but smiling, too.
"That will not do at all! I want to unpack it at once. I need some of the
things in it, for I've been traveling two days. Can't you take it on your
first load?"
"Wa-al--I might," confessed Dexter, looking her over with a quizzical

smile. "But us'ally the Days ain't in no hurry."
"Then this is one Day who is in a hurry," she said, briefly. "What is
your charge for delivering the trunk, sir?"
"Oh--'bout a quarter, Miss. And gimme that suitcase, too. 'Twon't cost
ye no more, and I'll git 'em there before Jason and you reach the house.
Poketown is a purty slow old place, Miss," the man added, with a wink
and a chuckle, "but I kin see the days are going to move faster, now
you have arove in town. Don't you fear; your trunk'll be there--'nless
Josephus, here, busts a leg!"
Quite stunned, Uncle Jason had not moved from his tracks. "Now we're
all right, sir," said the girl, cheerily, taking his arm and by her very
touch seeming to galvanize a little life into his scarecrow figure. "Shall
we go home?"
"Eh? Wal! Ef ye say so, Janice," replied Mr. Day, weakly.
They started up the main street of Poketown, Janice accommodating
her step to that of her uncle. Mr. Day was not one given to idle chatter;
but the girl did not notice his silence in her interest in all she saw.
It was a beautiful, shady way, with the hill not too steep for comfort.
And some of the dwellings set in the midst of their terraced old lawns,
were so beautiful! It was the beauty of age, however; there did not
seem to be a single new thing in Poketown.
Even the scant display of goods in the shop windows had lain there
until they were dust-covered, sun-burned, and flyspecked. The signs
over the store doors were tarnished.
They came to the lane that led up the hill away from High Street, and
on which Uncle Jason said he lived. An almost illegible sign at the
corner announced it to be "Hillside Avenue." There were not two
fences abutting upon the lane that were set in line, while the sidewalks
were narrow or broad, according to the taste of the several owners of
property along the way.

The beautiful old trees were everywhere, however; only some of them
needed trimming badly, and many overhung the roofs, their dripping
branches having rotted the shingles and given life to great patches of
green moss. There was a sogginess to the grass-grown yards that
seemed unhealthful. There were several, picturesque, old wells, with
massive sweeps and oaken buckets--quaint breeders of typhoid
germs--which showed that the physicians of Poketown had not properly
educated their patients to modern sanitary ideas.
Altogether the village in which her father had been born and bred was a
dead-and-alive, do-nothing place, and its beauty, for Janice Day, faded
before she was halfway up the hill to her uncle's house.
CHAPTER III
"IT JEST RATTLES"
Almira Day was a good-hearted woman. It was not in her to treat her
husband's niece otherwise than kindly, despite her threat to the contrary
when Jason left the old Day house to meet Janice at the steamboat
dock.
She stood smiling in the doorway--a large, pink, lymphatic woman, as
shapeless as a half-filled meal-sack with a string tied around its middle,
quite as untidy as her husband in dress, but with clean skin and a
wholesome look.
Her calico dress was faded and, in places, strained to the bursting-point,
showing that it was "store-bought" and had never been fitted to Mrs.
Day's bulbous figure. She wore a pair of men's slippers very much
down at the heel, and pink stockings with a gaping hole in