Janice Day Part 34

There had been other houses painted on the street that spring. More fences had been reset and straightened. The driveway itself had had some attention from the town. And you couldn't have found a one-hinged gate the entire length of the street!

As for Uncle Jason, he was really carrying on his farming in a businesslike way. Marty was getting to be a big boy now, and he could help more than he once had. Janice had suggested to Uncle Jason that, as he had such good pasture at the upper end of his farm, and as the milk supply of Poketown was but a meager one, it would pay somebody to run a small dairy.

Mr. Day now had three cows that he proposed to winter, and was raising one heifer calf. Such milk as the family did not use themselves the neighbors gladly bought. Mrs. Day was doing better with her hens, too.

The wire fencing had been repaired and she gave the biddies more attention; therefore she was being repaid in eggs and chickens for frying. Altogether it could no longer be said that the Day family was shiftless.

Janice received several cheerful and entertaining letters that summer from Nelson Haley. He was clerk of a summer hotel on the Maine sh.o.r.e, and he seemed to be having a good time as well as earning a considerable salary.

When the new school committee of Poketown tendered him an offer of the head mastership of the school (he was to begin with one a.s.sistant for the kindergartners), he threw up his clerkship and hastened to a certain summer normal school in central Ma.s.sachusetts.

Janice was very glad, although his action surprised her, knowing, as she did, how much young Haley needed the money he was earning at the hotel.

His tuition at the summer school for a month, and his board there, would eat up a good deal of the money he had saved. He might not be able to enter for his law studies at the end of another school year.

Janice believed, however, that Nelson Haley was "cut out," as the local saying was, for a teacher. He had an easy, interesting manner, which was bound to hold the attention of even the wandering minds among his pupils. She knew by the improvement in Marty that the young man's influence, especially on the boys of Poketown, was for good.

"If he would only make up his mind to _work_, he might rise high in the profession," she thought. "Some day he might even be president of a college--and wouldn't that be fine?"

But she did not write anything of this nature to the absent Nelson. She treasured in her mind what he had said about working because _she_ was proud of him; and she wisely decided that Nelson Haley was a young man who needed very little encouragement in some ways. Janice was by no means sure that she liked Nelson Haley as he liked her.

So she kept her answers to his letters upon a coolly friendly basis and only showed him, when he returned to Poketown in September in time for the dedication exercises of the school building, how glad she was to see him by the warmth of her greeting.

It was a real gala day in Poketown when the new school building was thrown open for public inspection. In the evening the upper floor of the building (which for the present was to be used as a hall) was crowded by the villagers to hear the "public speaking"; and on this occasion Nelson Haley again covered himself with glory.

He seemed to have gained enthusiasm, as well as a distinct idea of modern school methods, from his brief normal training. He managed to inspire his hearers with hope for a broader and higher education; his hopes for the future of the Poketown school lit responsive fires in the hearts of many of his listeners.

Of course, Elder Concannon did not agree. He was heard to say afterward that he couldn't approve of "no such new-fangled notions," and that he believed the boys and girls of Poketown "better stick to the three R's--reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic!"

However, the opinion of the people in general seemed to be in favor of the new ideas, and they promised to back up Nelson Haley in his work of modernizing the school.

"Of course you'll make it one of the best schools in the state--I know you will, Nelson," declared Janice, when he walked home with her after the exercises.

"If _you_ say so--of course!" replied the young man, with a smile.

CHAPTER XXV

THROUGH THE SECOND WINTER

During the summer, matters at the reading-room and library had been allowed to drift along to a great extent. Marty and one of his particular chums had kept the reading-room open evenings during Mr.

Haley's absence; but now Janice knew that the school-teacher would have his hands quite full without giving any time to the reading-room.

She set about making a second campaign for the advancement of the inst.i.tution and the broadening of its work. She found five girls beside herself willing to keep the reading-room open one afternoon a week, and to exchange books for the members of the library a.s.sociation. The inst.i.tution had proved its value in the community and Janice privately went to several people who were well able to help, and collected a fund for the payment of a regular librarian in the evening.

One of the boys who had shown most advancement during the spring in school work was glad to earn a small wage as librarian and caretaker of the reading-room evenings. An effort was made, too, to increase the number of volumes in the library so as to obtain a share of the State Library Appropriation for the next year.

Janice was not alone interested in the reading-room's affairs. There was the matter of a new piano for the Sunday-school room. The instrument in use had been a second-hand one when the Sunday School obtained it; and it was forever out of tune.

"However can you expect the children to sing in unison, and sing well, Mr. Scribner," Janice said to the Sunday-school superintendent, "when there isn't an octave in harmony on the old piano? Come on! let's see what we can do about getting a brand-new, first-cla.s.s instrument?"

"Oh, my dear girl! Impossible! quite impossible!" declared the superintendent, who was a bald, hopeless little man, who kept books for the biggest store in town, and was imbued with the prevailing Poketown spirit of "letting well enough alone."

"How do you know it is impossible till you try?" demanded the girl, laughing. "How much would you give, yourself, toward a new instrument?"

Mr. Scribner winked hard, swallowed, and burst out with: "Ten dollars!

Yes, ma'am! I'd go without a new winter overcoat for the sake of having a decent piano."

"That's a beginning," Janice said, gravely, seizing paper and pad. "And I can spare five. Now, don't you see, if we can interest everybody else in town proportionately, we'd have enough to buy _two_ pianos, let alone one.

"But let us start the subscription papers with our own offerings. You take one, and I'll take the other. You can ask everybody who comes into the store, and I'll go out into the highways and hedges and see what I can gather."

Janice interested the young people's society in the project, too; and her own enthusiasm, plus that of the other young folks, brought the thing about. At the usual Sunday-school entertainment on Christmas night the new piano was used for the first time, and Mrs. Ebbie Stewart, who played it, fairly cried into her score book, she was so glad.

"I was _so_ sick of pounding on that old tin-panny thing!" she sobbed.

"A real piano seems too good to be true."

The old Town Hall standing at the head of High Street--just where the street forked to become two country highways--had a fine stick of spruce in front of it for a flagpole; but on holidays the flag that was raised (if the janitor didn't forget it) was tattered like a battle-banner, and, in addition, was of the vintage of a score of years before. Our flag has changed some during the last two decades as to the number of stars and their arrangement on the azure field.

Of a sudden people began to notice the need of a new flag. Who mentioned it first? Why, that Day girl!

And she kept right on mentioning it until some people began to see that it was really a disgrace to Poketown--and almost an insult to the flag itself--to raise such a tattered banner. A grand silk flag, with new halyards and all, was finally obtained, the Congressman of the district having been interested in the affair. And on Washington's Birthday the Congressman himself visited the village and made an address when the flag was raised for the first time.

Gradually, other improvements and changes had taken place in Poketown.

There was the steamboat dock. It had been falling to pieces for years.

It had originally been built by the town; but the various storekeepers were most benefited by the wharf, for their freight came by water for more than half of the year.

Walky Dexter started the subscription among the merchants for the dock repairs. He subscribed a fair sum himself, too, for he was the princ.i.p.al teamster in Poketown.

"But who d'you s'pose started Walky?" demanded Mr. Cross Moore, shrewdly. "Trace it all back to one 'live wire'--that's what! If that Day gal didn't put the idee into Walky's head for a new dock, I'll eat my hat!"

And n.o.body asked Mr. Moore to try that gastronomic feat.

The selectman, himself, seemed to get into line during that winter. He stopped sneering at Walky Dexter and for some inexplicable reason he began agitating for better health ordinances.

There was an unreasonable warm spell in February; people in Poketown had always had open garbage piles during the winter. From this cause, Dr.

Poole, the Health Officer, declared, a diphtheria epidemic started which caused several deaths and necessitated the closing of a part of the school for four weeks.

Cross Moore put through a garbage-collection ordinance and a certain farmer out of town was glad of the chance to make a daily collection, the year around, for the value of the garbage and the small bonus the town allowed him. If the truth were known Mr. Moore's ordinance was copied almost word for word from the printed pamphlet of ordinances in force in a certain town of the Middle West called Greensboro. Now, how did the selectman obtain that pamphlet, do you suppose?

Yet Poketown, as a whole, looked about as forlorn and unsightly as it had when Janice Day first saw it. The improvement was not general. The malady--general neglect--had only been treated in spots.

There were still stores with their windows heaped with flyspecked goods. The horses still gnawed the boles of the shade trees along High Street. The flagstone sidewalks were still broken and the gutters unsightly. High street itself was rutted and muddy all through the early spring, after the snow had gone.

A few of the merchants patterned after Hopewell Drugg, brightened up their stores, and exposed only fresh goods for sale. But these few changes only made the general run of Poketown inst.i.tutions appear more slovenly. The contrast was that of a new pair of shoes, or a glossy hat, on a ragged beggar!

With Janice on one side to spur him, and Miss 'Rill's unbounded faith in him on the other hand, how _could_ Hopewell Drugg fall back into the old aimless existence which had cursed him when first Janice had taken an interest in his little Lottie, his store, and himself?