But the wind carried it out of my reach, and I trudged on supperless,
through Mayville, where the lights were beginning to shine in the
windows. Not one of them was for me. All my money had gone to pay
back debts to my Dexterville landlady. The Danes had a good name
in Jamestown, and we were all very jealous of it. We would have
starved, every one of us, rather than leave unpaid debts behind.
As Mrs. Ben Wah many years after put it to me, "it is no disgrace
to be poor, but it is sometimes very inconvenient." I found it
so when, worn out with walking, I crawled into an abandoned barn
halfway to Westfield and dug down in the hay, wet through and
hungry as a bear. It stormed and rained all night, and a rat or a
squirrel fell from the roof on my face. It felt like a big sprawling
hand, and woke me up in a great fright.
The sun was shining upon a peaceful Sabbath when I crawled out of
my hole and saw to my dismay that I had been sleeping in a pile
of old hay seed that had worked through and through my wet clothes
until I was a sight. An hour's patient plucking and a bath in a
near-by pond restored me to something like human shape, and I held
my entry into Westfield.
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