personally adorning one of its own citizens. A few years before it had
been currently reported that Jed Lewis was about to have such a suit to
be married in, but it turned out that the major part of the sum to be
devoted to that purpose actually went as the first payment on a parlor
organ and that Lafe Atwell purveyed the wedding garment. This denouement
had created a breath of dissatisfaction with Jed, and there were those
who argued that organs were more wasteful than clothes, because you
could go to church of a Sunday, drop a dime in the collection plate, and
hear all the organ music a body needed to hear.

So now Scattergood regarded Ovid speculatively through the window,
setting on opposite mental columns Ovid's salary of nine hundred dollars
a year and the probable total cost of tailor-made clothes and weekly
trips down the line on the "three-o'clock."

Scattergood was interested in every man, woman, and child in Coldriver.
Their business was his business. But just now he owned an especial
concern for Ovid, because he, and he alone, had placed the boy in the
bank after Ovid's graduation from high school--and had watched him, with
some pleasure, as he progressed steadily and methodically to a position
which Coldriver regarded as one of the finest it was possible for a
young man to hold. To be assistant cashier of the Coldriver Savings
Bank was to have achieved both social and business success.

Scattergood liked Ovid, had confidence in the boy, and even speculated
on the possibility of attaching Ovid to his own enterprises as he had
attached young Johnnie Bones, the lawyer. But latterly he had done a
deal of thinking. In the first place, there was no need for Mrs. Nixon
to continue to take in sewing when Ovid earned nine hundred a year; in
the second place, Ovid had been less engrossed in his work and more