The Village Convict | Page 7

thing. 'T ain't the fust time I 've known all hands to laugh all to once-t,
when I didn't see nothin'."
Susan helped him again, and secured another brief respite.
"Ephraim," said he, after a while, "you ain't skilled to cook oysters like
this, I don't believe. You ought to git married! I was sayin' to Susan
t'other day--well, now, mother, hev I said anything out o' the way? Well,
I don't s'pose 't was just my place to have said anything about gitt'n'
married, to Ephraim, seein's--"
"Come, come, father," said Aunt Lyddy, "that'll do, now. You must let
Ephraim alone, and not joke him about such things."
Meanwhile Susan had hastily gone into the pantry to look for a pie,
which she seemed unable at once to find.
"Pie got adrift?" called out Joshua. "Seems to me you don't hook on to

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