d out from his
tanned cheeks. A fuzzy beaver hat barely covered the bald spot on his
head. The reins were looped around his neck. Between his hands, huge
as hams, moaned and sucked and suffled and droned a much-patched
accordion. The instrument lamented like a tortured animal as he pulled
it out and squatted it together. To its accompaniment, the old man
sang over and over some words that he had fitted to the tune of "Old
Dog Tray,"

"Plug" Ivory Buck sat outside the door of his "emporium" in Smyrna
Corner, his chair tipped back comfortably, ankle roosting across his
knee, his fuzzy stovepipe hat on the back of his head.

The end of his cigar, red in the May dusk, was cocked up close to his
left eye with the arrogant tilt that signified the general temperament
of "Plug" Ivory. For almost fifty years a circus man, he felt a bland
and yet contemptuous superiority to those who had passed their lives
in Smyrna Corner. However, when his father had died at the ripe age of
ninety-three--died in the harness, even while gingerly and thriftily
knuckling along a weight into the eighth notch of the bar of the scoop
scales--Ivory had come back as sole heir to store, stock and stand, a
seventy-two-year-old black sheep bringing a most amazing tail behind
him--no less than a band chariot, a half dozen animal cages, a tent
loaded on a great cart, and various impedimenta of "Buck's Leviathan
Circus and Menagerie."

He trundled the array through the village's single street, stored the
gilded glories in the big barn on the old home place, with the
euphemism of circus terminology changed the sign "A. Buck, General
Store," to "I. Buck, Commercial Emporium," and there he had lived five
years, keeping "bachelor's hall" in the big house adjoining the store.

Sometimes he dropped vague hints that he might start on the road
again, displaying as much assurance of long years ahead as though he
were twenty-one. It was a general saying in Smyrna Corner that a Buck
didn't think he was getting old until after he had turned ninety. The
townspeople accepted Ivory as a sort of a wild goose of passage,
called him "Plug" on account of his never varying style of headgear,
and deferred to him because he had fifty thousand dollars tucked away
in the savings bank at the shire.

The May dusk became tawny in the west, and he gazed out into it
discontentedly.

"I wish them blamenation tadpoles shed their voices along with their
tails," he grumbled, with an