The sign post Zacheus had carried to the barn and put up in a loft as a family relic and reminder of other days. The signboard with “Taylor’s Tavern” upon it was laid reverently away in the garret in a big hair trunk which had belonged to his mother and held a few things which no one but himself often saw, for Dolly did not interfere with the trunk. Carefully wrapped in a pocket handkerchief was a baby’s white blanket, and pinned on it was a piece of paper with “Johnny’s Blanket” written upon it. Johnny was a little boy who died when only three days old and his father had taken the blanket and put it away in the trunk with some articles sacred to boyhood, such as a pair of broken skates, a woolen cap, a cornstalk fiddle, withered and dried, but kept for the sake of the brother who made it and who had sailed away to Calcutta as cabin boy in a ship which was lost with all on board. Giving up the sign was harder than any one suspected, and when he felt more than usually snubbed he would go up to the hair trunk and look at it with affection and regret and as nearly as he was capable of it with a feeling that it embodied all the real manhood he had known since his marriage and with its disappearance his identification with the place had disappeared, leaving him a figure-head, known as, Uncle Zach, or Mrs. Taylor’s husband. She was never really unkind to him. She merely ignored his opinions, and brought him up rather sharp at times when he displeased her. Henpecked him, the neighbors said, while he called it “running her own canoe.” “Not very hefty,” was the most she ever said of him to any one, and whether she meant mentally, or physically, or both, she did not explain. “Shiftless as the rot, with no more judgment or git up than a child,” was the worst she ever said to him, and he accepted her opinion as infallible and worshipped her as few women are worshipped by the man they hold in leading strings. She had been his Dot, or Dotty, when she was Dorothy Phelps and measured only half a yard round her waist, and he called her Dot still when she weighed two hundred and could throw him across the street. What she did was right, and after the burial of “Taylor’s Tavern” in the hair trunk he seldom objected to what she suggested, and when she told him she was going to improve and enlarge the house and make it into something worthy of its name, he told her to go ahead, and bore without any outward protest the discomfort of six weeks’ repairing, when carpenters and masons, plumbers and painters, transformed the old tavern into a comparatively modern structure of which Mrs. Taylor was very proud.