Page:Rural Hours.djvu/515

Rh the little community were supplied from the same establishment. Although circumstances have so much changed since those days, although the catalogue of necessaries and luxuries has been so much increased, yet the country store still preserves much of this character, and would seem to deserve a name of its own. It is neither a shop devoted to one limited branch of trade, nor a warehouse implying the same branch carried out on a greater scale, nor is it a bazaar where many different owners offer goods of various kinds within the same walls. The store, in fact, has taken its peculiar character, as well as its name, from the condition of the country; and the word itself, in this application of it, might bear a much better defence than many others which have found their way into books.

Now-a-days there are always, however, more than one store in every village. Indeed, you never find one of a trade standing long alone anywhere on Yankee ground. There is no such man in the country as the village doctor, the baker, the lawyer, the tailor; they must all be marshalled in the plural number. We can understand that one doctor should need another to consult and disagree with; and that one lawyer requires another with whom he may join issue in the case of Richard Roe vs. John Doe, but why there should always be two barbers in an American village, does not seem so clear, since the cut of the whiskers is an arbitrary matter in our day, whatever may be the uncertainties of science and law. Many trades, however, are carried on by threes and fours; it strikes one as odd that in a little town of some 1400 souls, there should be three jewellers and watchmakers. There are also some score of tailoresses—and both trade and word, in their feminine application, are said to be thoroughly American.