The Village Convict | Page 7

it very quick. Now that looks good," he added, when she came out.
"That looks like cookin'! All I meant was, 't Ephraim ought not to be doin' his own cookin'--that is, 'f you can call it cookin. But then, of course, 'tis cookin'--there's all kinds o' cookin'. I went cook myself, when I was a boy."
After supper, Aunt Lyddy sat down to knit, and Joshua drew his chair up to an open window, to smoke his pipe. In this vice Aunt Lyddy encouraged him. The odor of Virginia tobacco was a sweet savor in her nostrils. No breezes from Araby ever awoke more grateful feelings than did the fragrance of Uncle Joshua's pipe. To Aunt Lyddy it meant quiet and peace.
Susan and Eph sat down on the broad flag door-stone, and talked quietly of the simple news of the neighborhood, and of the days when they used to go to school, and come home, always together.
"I did n't much think then," said Eph, "that I should ever bring up where I have, and get ashore before I was fairly out to sea!"
"Jehiel's schooner got ashore on the bar, years ago," said Susan, "and yet they towed her off, and I saw her this morning, from my chamber window, before sunrise, all sail set, going by to the eastward."
"I know what you mean," said Eph. "But here--I got mad once, and I almost had a right to, and I can't get started again; I never shall. I can get a living, of course; but I shall always be pointed out as a jailbird, and could no more get any footing in the world than Portuguese Jim."
Portuguese Jim was the sole professional criminal of the town,--a weak, good-natured, knock-kneed vagabond, who stole hens, and spent every winter in the House of Correction as an "idle and disorderly person."
Susan laughed outright at the picture. Eph smiled too, but a little bitterly.
"I suppose it was more ugliness than anything else," he said, "that made me come back here to live, where everybody knows I 've been in jail and is down on me."
"They are not down on you," said Susan. "Nobody is down on you. It 's all your own imagination. And if you had gone anywhere that you was a stranger, you know that the first thing that you would have done would have been to call a meeting and tell all the people that you had burned down a man's barn and been in the State's-prison, and that you wanted them all to know it at the start; and you wouldn't have told them why you did it, and how young you was then, and how Eliphalet treated your mother, and how you was going to pay him for all he lost Here, everybody knows that side of it. In fact," she added, with a little twinkle in her eye, "I have sometimes had an idea that the main thing they don't like is, to see you saving every cent to pay to Eliphalet."
"And yet it was on your say that I took up that plan," said Eph. "I never thought of it till you asked me when I was going to begin to pay him up."
"And you ought to," said Susan. "He has a right to the money--and then, you don't want to be under obligations to that man all your life. Now, what you want to do is to cheer up and go around among folks. Why, now you 're the only fish-buyer there is that the men don't watch when he 's weighing their fish. You'll own up to that, for one thing, won't you?"
"Well, they are good fellows that bring fish to me," he said.
"They were n't good fellows when they traded at the great wharf," said Susan. "They had a quarrel down there once a week, regularly."
"Well, suppose they do trust me in that," said Eph. "I can never rub out that I 've been in State's-prison."
"You don't want to rub it out. You can't rub anything out that's ever been; but you can do better than rub it out."
"What do you mean?"
"Take things just the way they are," said Susan, "and show what can be done. Perhaps you 'll stake a new channel out for others to follow in, that haven't half so much chance as you have. And that's what you will do, too," she added.
"Susan!" he said, "if there 's anything I can ever do, in this world or the next, for you or your folks, that's all I ask for,--the chance to do it. Your folks and you shall never want for anything while I'm alive.
"There's one thing sure," he added, rising. "I'll live by myself and be independent of everybody, and make my way all alone in the world; and if I