Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/75

 and, seeing the trouble, concluded it was safer to stay where she stood. It was a closed cellar with no means of exit save by a narrow stairway. I succeeded in fighting the fire, finally got it stamped out, and saved the house.

A door opened from the rear of the store into the dining-room and another door from the dining-room into the kitchen. One afternoon I was tending the store, the girl in the dining-room was cleaning off the table, while the baby lay in the cradle beside her, and on the stove in the kitchen the doctor was trying a dubious experiment in the way of boiling some varnish to reduce its consistency. Suddenly the girl threw open the door from the dining-room and came rushing through the store, holding in one hand a napkin and in the other a knife and fork, followed by a volume of black smoke. In her terror she ran across Wood Street and took refuge behind a long box which there stood on the pavement. A moment later the doctor appeared at the door, his red hair and beard blackened and scorched. Suddenly the thought of the baby, abandoned by the girl, occurred to him and turning back he rescued it from its dangerous berth. The varnish had taken fire. Everything in the kitchen was burned up, but the fire engines and hose, soon coming upon the alarm, put out the fire before greater harm had been done. For two weeks the doctor remained unable to attend to business and I had entire charge of and responsibility for the store. At the end of the year his wife had her way and he sold the store to a man named Rex. I remained with him two weeks to enable him to learn the locations of the drugs and to introduce him to the customers, and then, having taken care of myself for a year and earned thirty dollars, I returned to Mont Clare. My entering the store was not altogether a wise movement, but, like most of the unwisdom of life, had its compensations in added experience and in ways we are not always able to measure.

At this time Rev. Joel E. Bradley, a preacher of the Baptist Church, had opened a school for boys and girls in Rh