It was while he was a clerk at Grassy Plain that Phineas met Charity Hallett. Charity had visited Grassy Plain on a Saturday to buy a hat from Aunt “Rushia,” the only milliner of the two towns. It was Phineas’s custom to return to Bethel every Saturday night, remaining with his mother until Monday, so that he might go to church with her. He was told that Charity was afraid to return to Bethel alone in the storm on this particular Saturday night. During the ride he learned that “the fair, rosy-cheeked, buxom girl, with beautiful white teeth,” as he later described her appearance at the time, was a tailoress in Bethel. Her face haunted him in his dreams that Saturday night. He met her in church the next morning, and the reality seemed to fulfil the pictures of his imagination. But he was able to see her only in church every Sunday that season, for they were separated by the distance between Bethel and Grassy Plain. As his job continued in a country store, Barnum became more inured to the ways and means of country store success. In his autobiography he recorded the gist of these: “It was ‘dog eat dog’--‘tit for tat.’ Our cottons were sold for wool, our wool and cotton for silk and linen; in fact nearly everything was different from what it was represented. The customers cheated us in their fabrics: we cheated the customers with our goods. Each party expected to be cheated, if it was possible. Our eyes, and not our ears, had to be our masters. We must believe little that we saw, and less that we heard.... Such a school would ‘cut eye-teeth,’ but if it did not cut conscience, morals, and integrity all up by the roots, it would be because the scholars quit before their education was completed.” He did quit for a time and went to Brooklyn, New York, where he was offered a position in a grocery store, but the humdrum of this existence of petty trade was beginning to annoy him. His disposition was speculative, and a regular salary never satisfied him, especially since all these early salaries were small. Although he was only seventeen years old, he was ambitious enough to want his own business, and he opened a porter-house in Brooklyn. He soon sold it at a profit and on the basis of his experience became a bartender in another porter-house in New York City. While working and living in New York, he visited the theater frequently, and soon became in his own opinion “a close critic.”