This was no lonesome wilderness wherein we had to scuffle for our food. The milkman came right after breakfast with the morning’s milk. The morning’s milk remember, not the night before’s. Then came the iceman. I want to tell you about him. I had seen him pushing the lawn-mower on a green velvet lawn before a mansion up the beach a ways. I thought he was turning an honest penny taking care of it for some one else. Bless your heart, he lived there. He had a fine big farm behind it, but it was all seeded down in grass, because the harvest of ice from the lake before him in the winter brought him more money for less work than the rich loam behind him could raise in summer crops. Then came the grocer from the village back in the country. He always brought us kerosene, sometimes he brought us groceries, and all too seldom he brought us the flat loaves of the Italian baker in the village, flat and crusty loaves, which the grocer scornfully called “dog-bread.” There was “the bearded lady” that brought us home-made bread just once—just once. Evidently she had confused the relative proportions of the yeast and flour. Then came the old man with the broken hand, talk about which shortened the day for him and us; also, his wife, a dear old soul, who sold us from time to time bouquets picked from her garden, old-fashioned flowers made up so round and hard that if a man were clouted on the head with a nosegay you’d have to take him to the hospital. There was “the bonnet lady,” a sweet-faced Dunkard in the habit of her faith. There were several whom we came to know right well, and after they began to suspect that, like as not, we weren’t as crazy as we seemed, living in tents—Did you ever hear the beat of that?—they showed they were just folks, same as anybody else. But the one I liked the best was the man that came on Saturdays to fetch us eggs and butter. I aroused his interest by telling him that where I came from they sold eggs by quarter’s worth; so many for a quarter, more when eggs were cheap, fewer when eggs were dear. Well sir, he like to never got over that. It was like the returned missionary, telling how the poor heathens live in China. He was a very conscientious man. “I’m sorry,” he would say, “but I’ve got to charge you 21 cents for them there eggs. They ain’t worth it. No eggs is worth that much, no time o’year. They ortn’t to be more’n 18 cents at any time. But the others is sellin’ ’em for 21, and I s’pose I got to, too.”