Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/366

 For myself, I should have set this thing to different words. I regarded Mrs. Potts as a zealot whom no advantage of worldly resource could blind to our shortcomings, nor deter from ministering unto them. Had it been unnecessary to earn bread for herself and little Roscoe, I am persuaded that she would still have been unremitting in her efforts to uplift us. In that event she might, it is true, have read us more papers and sold us fewer books; but she would have allowed herself as little leisure.

That Little Arcady was unequal to this broader view, however, was to be inferred from comments made in the hearing of and often, in truth, meant for the ears of Solon Denney. The burden was shifted to his poor shoulders with as little concern as if our best citizens had not cooperated with him in the original move, with grateful applause for its ingenious and fanciful daring. In ways devoid of his own vaunted subtlety, it was conveyed to Solon that Little Arcady expected him to do something. This was after the town had been cleanly canvassed for two monthly magazines—one of which had a dress-pattern in each number, to be cut out on the dotted line—and after our heroine had gallantly returned to the charge with a rather heavy "Handbook of Science for the Home,"—a book costing two dollars and fifty cents and treating of many matters, such as, how to conduct electrical experiments in a drawing-room, how to cleanse linen of ink-stains, how the world was made, who invented gun-powder, and how to restore the drowned.