and its
exact location and the volume of the supply are known to every child in
the mountains around. Out of it comes their lagnappe for making a
journey to the store.

Beside the door upon a shelf sits the water-bucket, kept cool by
frequent replenishing from the York spring. Here every man who enters
stops; and, after he has shifted his quid of tobacco, looked around, and
made his cheerful greeting a hearty one with, "Howdy people!" he lifts
the dipper filled with its pleasing refreshment--and the surplus goes
accurately, in a crystal curve, to the back of some venturesome chicken
that has come upon the store porch.

Above the door as you enter hangs a stenciled, uneven, unpunctuated
sign, "NO CREDIT CASH OR BARTER." But that sign has lost its potency. It
is yellow with age and no longer is there anyone who believes in it. It
was hung when John Marion first opened his store, and before he knew his
people and wanted cash or barter for his wares.

There is trading every day that is barter. But it is the women bringing
chickens under their arms, or it basket of eggs. The eggs are deposited
in a box, the storekeeper counting them aloud as he packs them for
shipment; or one of the eleven Rains' "kids" is bestirred to the barn
with the chickens, where they remain in semi-captivity until the egg and
poultry man, in an old canvas covered schooner, comes on his weekly
rounds. And the cash value to the barter is traded to a cent. A "poke"
of flour or of sugar or a cut of tobacco usually evens the transaction.

It is many a journey around the store that John Marion makes in a day.
The decision to purchase each article is announced slowly and as tho it
were the only thing desired. The plump and genial storekeeper goes
leisurely for it, and with a smile of satisfaction places it before the
customer. There is a moment of silence, then a journey for the next
need, and it is only in balancing the barter that the merchant makes a
suggestion.

In a small glass show-case is refuting testimony that the sign over the
door of NO CREDIT had been discredited long ago. The charge account is
open to everyone. A memorandum of the purchase is made upon a strip torn
from a writing-tablet or upon a piece of wrapping-paper and tossed into
the show-case, among many others of its kind, until the customer "comes
around to settle up." Then, with an unerring instinct, John Marion can
pull from the tumbled pile of memoranda the records of the charge