“Want a job? I'll be looking for one myself pretty soon, if business isn't better,” was the answer he got from the first man he approached. But Hiram kept at it, and got short answers and long answers, pleasant ones and some that were not so pleasant; but all could be summed up in the single monosyllable: “No!” “I certainly am a failure here in town,” Hiram thought, as he walked through the snow-blown streets. “How foolish I was ever to have come away from the country. “A fellow ought to stick to the job he is fitted for--and that's sure. But I didn't know. I thought there would be forty chances in town to one in the country. “And there doesn't seem to be a single chance right now. Why, I'll have to leave Mrs. Atterson's, if I can't find a job before next week is out! “This mean old town is over-crowded with fellows like me looking for work. And when it comes to office positions, I haven't a high-school diploma, nor am I fitted for that kind of a job. “I want to be out of doors. Working in a stuffy office wouldn't suit me. Oh, as a worker in the city I am a rank failure, and that's all there is about it!” He went home to supper much more tired than he would have been had he done a full day's work at Dwight's Emporium. Indeed, the job he had lost now loomed up in his troubled mind as much more important than it had seemed when he had desired to change it for another. Mother Atterson was at home. She hadn't more than taken off her bonnet, however, and had had but a single clash with Chloe in the kitchen. “I smelled it burnin' the minute I set my foot on the front step!” she declared. “You can't fool my nose when it comes to smelling burned stuff. “Well, Hiram,” she continued, too full of news to remark that he was at home long before his time, “I saw the poor old soul laid away, at least. I wish now I'd got Chloe in before, and gone to see Uncle Jeptha before he was in his coffin. “But I didn't think I could afford it, and that's a fact. We poor folks can't have many pleasures in this world of toil and trouble!” added the boarding house mistress, to whom even the break of a funeral, or a death-bed visit, was in the nature of a solemn amusement. “And there the old man went and made his will years ago, unbeknownst to anybody, and me bein' his only blood relation, as you might say, though it was years since I seen him much, but he remembered my mother with love,” and she began to wipe her eyes. “Poor old man! And me with a white-faced cow that I'm afraid of my life of, and an old horse that looks like a moth-eaten hide trunk we to have in our garret at home when I was a little girl, and belonged to my great-great-grandmother Atterson---- “And there's a mess of chickens that eat all day long and don't lay an egg as far as I could see, besides a sow and a litter of six pigs that squeal worse than the the switch-engine down yonder in the freight yard----