Page:Camperdown - Griffith - 1836.djvu/290

 never waiting to hear why Archy Campbell looked so mad at the customer.

It certainly was a great relief to them all, when the shop closed at sundown. Every one felt it a blessing but Ira Elkado; it cut him off from two or three hours of gazing at Jenny Hart, and in regaling himself with the thoughts of conquering this hard hearted gipsy, as he always called her. He lay awake for hours, very often, in trying to perfect some plan by which he could get admittance to her during the evening; but it never came to any thing. He was one of those kind of persons whose imaginations are fertile enough; but with physical capacities so entirely different, that a life is spent, or dawdled away, without any benefit to themselves or others. Had Ira Elkado been as brisk in his motions as he was in his mind, the shop and Jenny Hart might have been his long ago; but her good genius preserved her from a hard fate. Hard it would have been; for Ira Elkado never ended one of his aspiring soliloquies without grinding his teeth and promising himself great satisfaction in scourging her, after marriage, as she had scourged him before. Poor Jenny Hart did not mean to scourge him; it was her way of managing people. She was shrewd, and treated them according to their merits; but she was never unjust.

As soon as the shop was shut, and she had presided at the tea-table, (for in the old fashioned way, the clerks always lived in the house, and ate at the table, one after the other,) she assisted Martin Barton and Archy Campbell in counting the money of the day; and it was a job. But by the judicious mode of keeping the different money apart; and, oh, how she rated the poor clerk, in whose box a sixpence was found in the shilling department—much time was saved. Martin Barton and his wife, good souls, went tired to bed, as soon as this was over; and then came Jenny Hart's holiday: