always does. If it were Rachel I would not mind; but I cannot abear
Jacob, with his great hairy hands and fat cheeks. And if I be pert
to him, my father chides; and if I be kind, he makes me past all
patience with his rolling eyes and foolish ways and words. I know
what they all think; but I'll none of him! He had better try for
Kezzie, who would jump down his throat as soon as look at him. She
fair rails on me for not treating him well. Let her take him
herself, the loutish loon!"

And tossing her head so that her coverchief required readjusting,
Cherry slipped down the narrow wooden staircase into the rooms that
lay below.

Kitchen and dining parlour occupied the whole of this floor, which
was not the ground floor of the house. That was taken up by the
shop, in which Martin Holt's samples of wools and stuffs were
exposed. He was more (to borrow a modern expression) in the
wholesale than the retail line of business, and his shop was
nothing very great to look at, and did not at all indicate the
scope of his real trade and substance; but it was a convenient
place for customers to come to, to examine samples and talk over
their orders. Martin Holt sat all day long in a parlour behind the
shop, pretty well filled with bales and sacks and other impedimenta
of his trade, and received those who came to him in the way of
business. He had warehouses, too, along the wharves of Thames
Street, and visited them regularly; but he preferred to transact
business in his own house, and this dull-looking shop was quite a
small centre for wool merchants, wool manufacturers, and even for
the farmers who grew the wool on the backs of the sheep they bred
in the green pastures. No more upright and fair-dealing man than