J.F.’s store was a kind of hub of the community in those days and it was a good store, not one of the new kind where you wheel a little wagon around and feel foolish and can’t find anything, but one in which he helped you graciously and simultaneously to good merchandise and good conversation, and everyone had plenty of time anyway. It was a well-built store, a kind of Greek-revival with a Cape Cod accent, meticulously clean within and shining without. Only its huge front windows and pale yellow siding set it apart from the village of neat, white houses that sprawled around it. To compensate for that, there was, atop it, a fascinating cupola from which you could get a view of the Sound. Along the front of the store there was a commodious porch with two large benches. The benches carried on their slatted back a faded advertisement for Dr. somebody-or-other’s Bitters but bitters were already out of fashion and you could hardly have read the advertisement anyway because the benches were never empty. They had been placed just so to catch the pleasant breezes from the Sound and they were for resting and conversation. Inside the store and along each of the two side walls were rows and rows of narrow wooden shelves that reached right up to the ornamental tin-ceiling. The shelves held a colorful mass of tinned goods and Quaker Oats and tea and if you wanted something from the high ones J.F. would secure it for you with a boat-hook. His aim was deft and true and it was always a temptation to ask for some of the little-called-for merchandise from the heights. In front of each of the tiers of shelves there was a long counter which held made-up orders and daily specials but most especially they held some very wonderful and tantalizing glass show-cases. The glass case to the right of the store held corn cob pipes and cut plug, shoe laces, work gloves and fish hooks, all in an ordered disorder that made everything easy to get at. No matter how much was sold this display always appeared to be miraculously unchanged. But it was the glass case on the left-hand counter that always drew my attention for inside it in regimental rows were displayed all the wonders of a small boy’s world. There were sleek, curly licorice whips and cigar-shaped licorice sticks; banana-tasting candy in the shape of bananas, mint-tasting candy in the shape of mint leaves, peanut butter candy in the shape of pink, satiny bolsters; there were heart-shaped peppermints with red mottos like “I love U” and “Oh you kid”, there were large, round, chocolate Old Fashioneds, orange and white “corn kernels” and many another item to keep a boy in agonizing, wonderful indecision. Time was only responsible to your own appetite and once you had made up your mind the penny candy would be carefully counted out and put helter-skelter into a small brown bag with a string around its neck. It would be discovered only later on the walk home that, somehow, several extra pieces had been slipped into the bag.