hardware, but hitherto in a purely
amateur and detached fashion. Now he lived with it, from tacks to
tractors, ten or twelve hours a day. He found that being the son of his
father gained him no safe conduct through the shop or with the
customers. He had a lot to learn, even if he was John Wesley Farwell,
Jr. That he was the heir apparent to all this array of cast iron and
wrought and galvanized, of tin and wire and steel and aluminum and
nickel, did not save him from aching back and skinned knuckles, nor from
the various initiations staged by the three or four other employees.

But he was getting his bearings, and not from the store and the
warehouse only. A good hardware store in a country town is a center of
democracy for town and country alike. In what other place do farmers and
artisans, country women and city women meet on so nearly equal terms?
Not in the postoffice, nor in the bank; and certainly not in the
department store. But the hardware store's customers, men and women all,
are masters of the tools they work with; and whoso loves the tools of
his craft is brother to every other craftsman.

It was in the store, therefore, that J.W. began to absorb some of the
knowledge and acquire some of the experiences that were to make his work
something to his town.

For one thing, he got a new view of local geography, in terms of tools.
All the farmers from the bottoms of Mill Creek called for pretty much
the same implements; the upland farms had different needs. The farmers'
wives who lived along the route of the creamery wagon had one sort of
troubles with tinware; the women of the fruit farms another. J.W. knew
this by the exchange of experiences he listened to while he sold milk
strainers and canning outfits. He found out that the people on the edge
of town who "made garden" were particular about certain tools and
equipment which the wheat farmer would not even look at.

And the townpeople he learned to classify in the same way. He was soon
on good terms with those store clerks who were handy men about the
house, with women who did all their own work, with blacksmiths and
carpenters, with unskilled laborers and garage mechanics. In time he
could almost tell where a man lived and what he did for a living, just
by the hardware he bought and the questions he asked about it.
Heretofore J.W. had thought he knew most of the people in Delafield.
But the first weeks in the store showed him that he knew only a few. Up
to