Highways and byways of the Pacific coast . around this country empty-handed andlookin for work, you can be dead sure hes prayin toGod never to find it. At the village hotel, among a few other transientswas a watch-peddler. He was eighty-six years old,bowed and gray, but still brisk and hearty. He had aneat little grip packed with the watches and with avariety of chains, fobs and jewelry, and he not onlysold from this stock, but did repairing. He mentionedone family in the place to which he had sold elevenwatches, and good ones, too. His sales to thatparticular family would have been fewer had
Highways and byways of the Pacific coast . around this country empty-handed andlookin for work, you can be dead sure hes prayin toGod never to find it. At the village hotel, among a few other transientswas a watch-peddler. He was eighty-six years old,bowed and gray, but still brisk and hearty. He had aneat little grip packed with the watches and with avariety of chains, fobs and jewelry, and he not onlysold from this stock, but did repairing. He mentionedone family in the place to which he had sold elevenwatches, and good ones, too. His sales to thatparticular family would have been fewer had it not beenthat its head was a logging laborer on the river, andoccasionally lost a watch in the water. The peddlerhad been in the country for many years, and he hadobserved much and intelligently. I was interested inhis views of the difference between life in New Englandand in the Far West. I remember very well my fathers house back inVermont, said he one evening as we were sittingtogether in the hotel office. It was big and substantial. In a village on the Columbia Along the Columbia 261 and we had a nice garden and raised all sorts of thingsfor our own eating. My father, as affairs went then andin that region, was a rich man. He owned a good farmand had four or five thousand dollars in the called him Uncle Joe, and if anyone neededto borrow theyd come to him. They didnt borrowvery heavy. A hundred dollars was a big pile for aman to go in debt them days—thats what it was! Myfather want an eddicated man. It was my motherlearned him to write after they was married. He usedto do most of his figgering with a piece of charcoal ona board. When I first came out here I took up a claim, andI had a neighbor on one side of me that was nicknamedGassy Smith because he talked so much, and on theother side lived a man called *Hog Jones who was sostingy he want fit to live. Hog was well off, but hewas like this—if you was to buy a bushel of wheat ofhim that was worth seven
Size: 1363px × 1832px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookauthorjohnsonclifton1865194, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900
