Partly because the sight of him sensibly influenced my mood, and partly because inevitably he made me think of Sam Graham, I turned off at Beech Street, leaving him to pursue his way toward the centre of town. Graham's one-horse drug-store stood on Beech, a block south of Main. That being the least promising location in town for a business of any sort, Sam had naturally selected it when he concluded to set up shop. If Sam had ever in his life displayed any symptoms of business sagacity, Radville would never have recovered from the shock. I believe it was Legrand Gunn, our only really certificated village wit, who coined the epigram: "As useless as to take a prescription to Graham's." The implication being that Graham didn't carry sufficient stock to fill any prescription; which was largely true; he couldn't; he hadn't the money to stock up with. What little he took in from time to time went in part to the support of Betty and himself, but mainly to pay interest on his debts and buy raw materials for models of his thousand-and-one inventions. Most Radvillians firmly believed that Sam has at some time or other in his busy, worthless career invented everything under the sun, practicable or impracticable--the former always a few days after somebody else had taken out patents for the identical device. But at that time no one believed he would ever make a cent out of any one of the children of his ingenious brain; nor was I, in this respect, more credulous than any of my fellow-townsmen. I lingered a moment outside the shop, thinking of the change that had come over it since the death of Margaret Graham, Betty's mother. For, despite its out-of-the-way location, the shop had not always been unprofitable; while Margaret lived (my heart still ached with the memory of her name) Sam's business had prospered. She had been one of those woman who can rise to any emergency in the interest of her loved ones; the first to realise Sam's improvidence and lack of executive ability, she had taken hold of the business with a firm hand and made it pay--while she lived. It has never ceased to be a source of wondering speculation to me, that she, with her gentle training, so wholly aloof from every thought of commerce or economy, should have proven herself so thorough and level-headed a business woman. There's no accounting for it, indeed, save on the theory that she conceived it a woman's function to make up for man's deficiencies; Sam needed her, so she become his wife; he needed a manager, so she had became that also.... During Margaret's regime, as I say, the shop had thrived. Sam had few ill-wishers in Radville; the trade came his way. Then Betty was born and Margaret died....