f the kitchen door, cream and all,--and that lost her a
husband.
Love, the second, married, and according to local tradition once kicked
her husband all the way up Foolscap Hill with a dried cod-fish. Charity,
the third, married too,--for the Stovers of Scarboro were handsome
girls, but she got a fit mate in her spouse. She failed to intimidate
him, for he was a foeman worthy of her steel; but she left his bed and
board, and left in a manner that kept up the credit of the Stover family
of Scarboro.
They had had a stormy breakfast one morning before he started to
Portland with a load of hay. "Good-by," she called, as she stood in the
door, "you've seen the last of me!" "No such luck!" he said, and whipped
up his horse. Charity baked a great pile of biscuits, and left them on
the kitchen table with a pitcher of skimmed milk. (She wouldn't give
him anything to complain of, not she!) She then put a few clothes in a
bundle, and, tying on her shaker, prepared to walk to Pleasant River,
twelve miles distant. As she locked the door and put the key in its
accustomed place under the mat, a pleasant young man drove up and
explained that he was the advance agent of the Sypher's Two-in-One
Menagerie and Circus, soon to appear in that vicinity. He added that
he should be glad to give her five tickets to the entertainment if she
would allow him to paste a few handsome posters on that side of her barn
next the road; that their removal was attended with trifling difficulty,
owing to the nature of a very superior paste invented by himself; that
any small boy, in fact, could tear them off in an hour, and be well paid
by the gift of a ticket.
The devil entered into Charity (not by any means for the first time),
and she told the man composedly that if he would give her ten tickets he
might paper over the cottage as well as the barn, for they were going
to tear it down shortly and build a larger one. The advance agent was
delighted, and they passed a pleasant hour together; Charity holding the
paste-pot, while the talkative gentleman glued six lions and an elephant
on the roof, a fat lady on the front door, a tattooed man between the
windows, living skeletons on the blinds, and ladies insufficiently
clothed in all the vacant spaces and on the chimneys. Nobody went by
during the operation, and the agent remarked, as he unhitched his horse,
that he had never done a neater job. "Why, they'll come as far to see
your house as they will to t
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