I tell you, my friend, it ain't
doing this town one bit of good. The idea of a passel of strong, husky
young men settin' around on porches in their white pants and calling it
'passing the summer.' _I_ ain't never found time to pass any summers."
The wanderer expressed a proper regret for this decadence. Mr. Keyts
reverted bitterly to the Bon Ton market:--
"Good name for a tooth powder, or a patent necktie, or an egg-beater.
But a butcher-shop!--why, it's a _hell_ of a name for a
butcher-shop!"
The wanderer expressed perfect sympathy with this view of the shop
legend, and remarked, "By the way, whose big house is that with the
columns in front, up where the Prouse and old Blake houses used to be?"
The face of Mr. Keyts became pleasanter.
"Oh, that?--that's Cal Blake's--Major Blake's, you know. He married a
girl that come in here from the South with her mother. I guess that was
after you got out of here. They tore down the two houses and built that
big one. They say it's like them Southern houses, but I don't know. It
seems awful plain up the front of it. Cal's all right, though. I guess
mebbe he built the house kind of bare that way to please his wife and
his mother-in-law.
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