SQUIRE PHIN By Holman Day New York: Harper & Brothers 1913 [Illustration: 0001] [Illustration: 0003] [Illustration: 0010] [Illustration: 0011] [Illustration: 0013] SQUIRE PHIN CHAPTER I--“HARD-TIMES” WHARFF COCKS HIS NOSE TO SNIFF TROUBLE “Miss Lu-ce-e-e had a par-ret, An’ she kep’ it in the gar-ret, An’ she fed it on a car-ret, An’ she called him J. Iscar-ret, Tidy-um, Tidy-um! “An’ the par-ret had a feather That was blue in stormy weather, Or ‘twas red,--I donno whether, But ‘twas either one or t’ether, Tidy-um, Tidy-um!” --Favourite Song of “Hard-times” Wharff. The village sounds in Palermo that sleepy afternoon were only the “summer snorin’s,” as Marriner Amazeen used to say. There was the murmur of flies buzzing lazily around some banana, skins which curled limply in the August sun in front of Asa Brickett’s store. At the side of the building, in a patch of shade, a half-dozen old men, jack-knifed on a rickety settee, droned in intermittent conversation. From open kitchen windows along the village street came subdued sounds of the after-dinner work of the housewives--clash of cutlery and clatter of dishes. In a dusty maple whose lower branches had taken toll from passing loads of hay, a cicada shrilled his long-drawn note, like an almost interminable yawn. “First August fiddler I’ve heard,” commented one of the old men in the shade. “As old Drew used to say in his _Rural Intelligencer_: “When August’s locusts wind their horn Then first you know, Good Summer’s gone!” “Well, you don’t have to walk very fur in this sun to find out that she ain’t gone yit,” remarked an old man who had just arrived. He picked a few fresh burdock leaves and stuffed them into the crown of his cotton hat. “Some one ought to make ’Quar’us Wharff come in here out o’ that sun,” he growled, scowling at a figure that stood on the corner of Brickett’s store platform, as straight and stiff as the gnawed hitching-post on the opposite corner. With cadence fully as sleepy as the other sounds of the languorous afternoon, a squeaking whiffle-tree came down the avenue of elms that bordered the street. The whiffle-tree was attached to a surrey that showed a city smartness of paint and trimmings under the dust. The bulk of the man on the front seat strained his linen coat. The two ladies on the back seat, evidently his wife and daughter, fairly crushed the springs with their weight.