Page:Poor White.djvu/68

 from a factory in Philadelphia. " I came in to ask if you'll repair them if they get out of order," he said. Joe Wainsworth began to fumble with the tools on his bench. Then he turned to look the farmer in the eye and to do what he later spoke of to his cronies as " laying down the law." " When the cheap things begin to go to pieces take them somewhere else to have them repaired," he said sharply. He grew furiously angry. ' Take the damn things to Philadelphia where you got 'em," he shouted at the back of the farmer who had turned to go out of the shop. Joe Wainsworth was upset and thought about the in- cident all the afternoon. When farmer-customers came in and stood about to talk of their affairs he had nothing to say. He was a talkative man and his ap- prentice, Will Sellinger, son of the Bidwell house painter, was puzzled by his silence. When the boy and the man were alone in the shop, it was Joe Wainsworth's custom to talk of his days as a journeyman workman when he had gone from place to place working at his trade. If a trace were being stitched or a bridle fashioned, he told how the thing was done at a shop where he had worked in the city of Boston and in another shop at Providence, Rhode Is- land. Getting a piece of paper he made drawings illus- trating the cuts of leather that were made in the other places and the methods of stitching. He claimed to have worked out his own method for doing things, and that his method was better than anything he had seen in all his travels. To the men who came into the shop to loaf during winter afternoons he presented a smiling front and talked of their affairs, of the price of cab- bage in Cleveland or the effect of a cold snap on the