“Miss Lu-ce-e-e had a par-ret,

An’ she kep’ it in the gar-ret,

An’ she fed it on a car-ret,

An’ she called him J. Iscar-ret,

Tidy-um,

Tidy-um!

“An’ the par-ret had a feather

That was blue in stormy weather,

Or ‘twas red,—I donno whether,

But ‘twas either one or t’ether,

Tidy-um,

Tidy-um!”

—Favourite Song of “Hard-times” Wharff.

The village sounds in Palermo that sleepy afternoon were only the “summer snorin’s,” as Marriner Amazeen used to say. There was the murmur of flies buzzing lazily around some banana, skins which curled limply in the August sun in front of Asa Brickett’s store. At the side of the building, in a patch of shade, a half-dozen old men, jack-knifed on a rickety settee, droned in intermittent conversation. From open kitchen windows along the village street came subdued sounds of the after-dinner work of the housewives—clash of cutlery and clatter of dishes. In a dusty maple whose lower branches had taken toll from passing loads of hay, a cicada shrilled his long-drawn note, like an almost interminable yawn.

“First August fiddler I’ve heard,” commented one of the old men in the shade. “As old Drew used to say in his Rural Intelligencer:

“When August’s locusts wind their horn

Then first you know, Good Summer’s gone!”

“Well, you don’t have to walk very fur in this sun to find out that she ain’t gone yit,” remarked an old man who had just arrived. He picked a few fresh burdock leaves and stuffed them into the crown of his cotton hat. “Some one ought to make ’Quar’us Wharff come in here out o’ that sun,” he growled, scowling at a figure that stood on the corner of Brickett’s store platform, as straight and stiff as the gnawed hitching-post on the opposite corner.

With cadence fully as sleepy as the other sounds of the languorous afternoon, a squeaking whiffle-tree came down the avenue of elms that bordered the street.

The whiffle-tree was attached to a surrey that showed a city smartness of paint and trimmings under the dust. The bulk of the man on the front seat strained his linen coat. The two ladies on the back seat, evidently his wife and daughter, fairly crushed the springs with their weight.

The portly man pulled up at the watering trough in Palermo’s little square and grunted over the wheel. When the horses began to wallow in the tub, plunging their reeking noses almost to their eyes, he handed the reins to his wife and walked toward the store, his gaze upon a bunch of wilted bananas that dangled just inside the door.

The six gaunt men in the shade surveyed this triple display of city avoirdupois with disfavour. Somehow it all seemed a silent boast of urban prosperity.

“I don’t reckon his woman needs to hang onto them reins very tight,” grunted Uncle Lysimachus Buck. “It’s all them horses can do to walk with that load—much less run away.”

“All city folks do is stuff themselves mornin’, noon and night, and then ’tween meals,” said Marriner Amazeen. “He’s after suthin’ to eat now, and I’ll bet ye on it.”

“How much for a dozen of those bananas?” asked the rotund man, addressing the individual who stood so stiffly on the corner of the platform.

“Wind sou’ by one p’int to the west, havin’ swung from west by nothe,” was the reply. He did not look at his questioner, but kept his head straight and his nose in the air.

“That ain’t nothin’ but ’Quar’us havin’ a weather-vane spell,” apologised Brickett, appearing in the door and lounging against the side of the building. He drawled, “I’ll sell ye fifteen for a quarter. Help yourself.”

The stranger broke off the fruit, stuffed it into his wide pockets, placed the change in Brickett’s languid palm, and went back to his carriage, casting an eye of scorn on the platform sentinel as he repassed him.

Then he climbed painfully back to his seat. With a grunt he pulled the reluctant horses back from the trough, where they were now making pretence of drinking, sucked his tongue at them pantingly and proceeded on his “carriage tour of the coast.”

As the horses plodded into the sun-glare from under the village elms, the portly man swung around and said to his wife and daughter: “The town pump and the town clock and the town fool, fifty houses bunched around ’em and everybody asleep! My God, think of living in a place like this all your life.”

“The old man standing on the store platform wasn’t crazy, was he, papa?” the daughter inquired.

“Why don’t you use your eyes once in a while, Belle?” the fat man snorted. “The way country towns let old lunatics run at large is something awful.”

He whipped up and the surrey clattered across the bridge at the head of the cove. There was a puff of cool air from the shadows where the tide gurgled about the weedy piles, and the three people went on around the hill with the tang of the salt smell in their nostrils, and in their minds a totally erroneous idea of Palermo and one of its institutions.

Fat city men are sometimes too matter-of-fact to understand the eccentricities of genius. This traveller simply went on—out of Palermo and out of this story—he and his wife and his daughter, his reeking horses and smart surrey. He beheld Aquarius Wharff actually engaged in his biggest job of prognostication—-snuffing at the first of a train of events that “ripped open” Palermo—and yet he only clucked to his horses and drove on and never realised what he had observed.

“Hard-times” Wharff had been standing for quite two hours in the broiling sun on the extreme corner of Asa Brickett’s grocery store platform. His attitude was familiar enough to his townsmen. He was on the tripod, so to speak, as a soothsayer, though it is hardly proper, perhaps, to speak of one leg as a tripod. He wearily balanced himself, shifting feet from time to time. His dingy old felt hat had the crown pinched to a peak and, before and behind, the broad brim was similarly pinched to peaks. The effect was somewhat that of a general’s chapeau, and its ludicrous illusion was heightened by a considerable assortment of rooster’s tail feathers thrust into the crown.

When “Hard-times”—a name more generally employed locally than Aquarius—stood on one foot in front of Brickett’s store, his hat flattened fore and aft—‘twas known by local observers that he was having one of his “weather-vane spells.” Now, this little fancy harmed no one, and it was agreed in Palermo that no other resident could smell a change of weather so far ahead as Aquarius Wharff.

If he stood on two feet, well balanced, and glowered grimly, he was merely indulging in a fancy for his own amusement. Though he never explained his ruminations to any one, it was suspected that he revelled in a proud triumph of the imagination and felt all the haughtiness of a bald-headed eagle. Certain it is that Palermo respected his abstraction and did not smile when he stroked his plumage and fixed a still more piercing gaze on the horizon.

Aquarius Wharff believed—and his townsmen agreed—that as a weather-vane he was distinctly serviceable to Palermo. He would inveigh against the inaccuracy of the dingy, rusty arrow on the Union Meeting-house, and then would perk his nose into the wind, and rotate himself on his wavering leg to show his own superior manageability. When he permitted himself to play eagle it was purely for his own relaxation.

When he was not engaged in either pursuit Aquarius Wharff was a mild and neighbourly man who lived with his “old maid” sister, Virgo, in the little brown house beyond the currier shop. His twin delusions were his only “outs,” and his tolerant neighbours in Palermo had long ago ceased to pay any attention to his divagations. But when a man stands for two hours in the broiling sun in one attitude he makes a picture that disturbs his friends. Uncle Lysimachus Buck, whose chair was propped against the side of the store in the shade, desisted from “teaming” a worried caterpillar with his cane and called querously: “For timenation’s sake, ’Quar’us, come set down out o’ the sun, do! It makes me steam and sweat to look at ye.”

“Wind quart’rin’ to west’ard, mack’rel sky, sign o’ rain, hard times gen’rally and nothin’ ’cept air put into doughnut holes nowadays,” croaked Aquarius without turning his head; “I jest see six crows fly s’uth’ards from the Cod-Head spruces, and that means somethin’ ’sides a heavy fog.”

He shifted to his other leg and set his neck more stiffly, and continued at his feat of endurance with the pertinacity of an Indian fakir.

“He’ll git sunstruck, sure’s Tophet’s a poor place to store powder in,” commented Buck. His snappy tones indicated that his selfishness at being annoyed by the figure in the sun’s glare was more provoked than his solicitude.

“Why don’t you git under a tree and rest?” he demanded. “An’ if you’re bound and determined to play dog-vane, then hold an emb’rel over yourself. Swan, if it don’t make me dizzy to watch him!” Uncle Buck took off his cotton hat and turned the burdock leaves in the crown to bring their cool surface next to his bald head.

“I’ve thought at times that ’Quar’us was losin’ his mind some—more’n what runs in the family,” observed Dow Babb, unhooking his toe from behind his ankle and immediately retwisting his long, gaunt legs in the other direction. His townsmen had nicknamed him “Fly” Babb on account of this trait.

“He ain’t nobody’s fool, ’Quar’us ain’t,” remarked Brickett, who, in the midday dearth of traffic, was lounging at the shady side of the store. “Them Wharffses is weather-struck and always was so, ’way back. It runs in the fam’ly—seems to! Old Gran’ther Wharff, you know, kept a di’ry of storms, droughts, hot and cold streaks and all such, till the day he died, and his son Zodiac figured out of that di’ry all the signs of storms and so forth. I’ve got ’em writ some’ere in my desk—change o’ wind, birds’ flyin’s, bugs’ actions, cobweb signs on the grass and all! Yass’r, the weather streak runs in the family, all right.”

“I reckon it must ’a’ been runnin’ hard in Zodiac Wharff,” snorted Buck, “to make him saddle sech names on to his children as ’Quarius, Capri-cornus, A-rees, Virgo and—what was that light-complected one that went West and got lugged off by a terronado? I can never think of that dum name!”

“Sagittar’us, wa’n’t it?” suggested Brickett.

“Ye-e-aw, that’s it, and he called them ‘Signs of the Zodiac,’ Zode did. No wonder the most of ’em died young in that fam’ly! Names like them would kill yaller dogs.”

“’Quar’us, ain’t you comin’ in out o’ that blaze o’ sun?” rasped Buck.

“Don’t buther me when I’m prognosticatin’,” replied the stubborn meteorologist; “ain’t you gittin’ all your weather from me free—and hard times all ’round us at that—wind shiftin’s and signs and portents and all the wonders of the heavens? Then lemme alone. Kingbird chasin’ a crow,” he went on with his eye on the horizon, where the dwarf spruces bristled on Cod-Head like spikes on a huge quillpig. “And ’tain’t all weather that’s a-comin’ this way to-day.”

“Spite o’ that loony streak in the Wharffses they have done some pretty tol’lable s’prisin’ things,” observed Dow Babb, untwisting his legs and reversing his clutch. “There’s somethin’ else in ’em besides that weather crack. Now, we all know here in P’ler-mo that ’Quar’us can smell a weather change quick’s a groundhog can. Born with the faculty, you might say. Takes it from old Zode, and even further back, for that matter. But him and Virgo, both of ’em, take somethin’ different than the weather streak from the mother’s side. She was old Rudd Goffses’ girl of Smyrna Mills, and old Rudd could cast a mist.”

“I’ve heard he could,” vouchsafed Marriner Amazeen, striking the dottle from his clay pipe into his hard palm with a flare of sparks and preparing for a refill.

“He was born with a caul, Rudd was.”

“Heard that, too,” tersely agreed Amazeen. “Old Aunt Spencer ’fore she died was tellin’ my mother that the caul was just like lace, and came down all ‘round his face, and they had to untie it where it was knotted behind jest like a woman’s veil.”

“Yass’r, he had the second sight and the seventh sense, and he could really magick folks, Rudd could,” Babb went on; “and there’s people alive right over in Smyrna to-day that’ll tell you what they’ve seen with their two eyes. ’Tain’t no use for us to poo-hoo things that was before our time, just ’cause we didn’t see ’em. I tell you, the old sirs could do things we couldn’t, and Rudd was one of the best o’ the lot in the magickin’ line. One day down to Smyrna, in the Guild deestrick, he cast a mist on much as a dozen people at once, and they thought they saw a Braymy rooster of old Matherson’s haulin’ off a twenty foot log up street. Whilst they was standin’ gawpin’, ’long come old Zene Sparks and says, ‘What ye standin’ here for, all on ye?’

“‘Ain’t it enough of a thing to stand around for when a rooster is haulin’ off a log like that?’ asked one o’ the crowd, pointin’ his finger.

“Zeke ups and says, ‘That rooster must be owin’ all on ye money by the way you’re lookin’ at him. He ain’t doin’ anything except walk along with an oat straw hitched to his tail!’

“And that’s all there was to it, so fur’s Zene could see. The mist wasn’t cast on him, you understand, for he wasn’t there at the start-off.”

There followed an interval of meditative silence, broken at length by the slow voice of Amazeen, beginning another chronicle.

“I’ve heard tell,” he droned, “of Rudd bettin’ ten bushels of oats down to the old blacksmith shop that used to set where the curry shop sets now, that he would put his head right against the butt of a hemlock log that laid in the yard and crawl right through it lengthwise and come out o’ the little end. They took him up—the three or four that was there—and he got down on his hands and knees, and they all swear to a man that he went right out o’ sight into that log. Up come a man that the mist wasn’t over, and when they told him what kind of a hen was on he vowed and declared that he couldn’t see nothin’ out o’ the way but old Rudd Goff crawlin’ along the top of the log, and then the man up and gave Rudd a jeerously old swat with his gad-stick, and Rudd come hopping off that log in a hurry, now, I tell you. And all could see him then. He laid his hands on the tingly place and he let into that man hot and heavy, so fur’s language would take him. If Rudd’s tongue had been a horsewhip that man would have ridges all over him. But as it was they haw-hawed old Rudd off’n the premises. He could cast a mist, though, there ain’t no doubt about that! And there was lots of old sirs that could.”

Babb retwisted his legs with a nervous snap as he concluded.

The little group in the shade gazed on the solitary figure bathed in the beating August sunshine. For a moment he ceased to be in their eyes merely old “Hard-Times” Wharff. They stared at him with a bit of superstitious respect, as they always did when they remembered how the blood of old Rudd Goff was in him.

“You’ve got to own up that there are queer things in this world.” mumbled Amazeen.

The old man on the platform revolved slightly on his single leg of support. He slowly swung his head from side to side, his eyes still on the horizon line.

“They’ve lit five times and ris’ five times and circled five times and now lit again,” he cried.

“Who’s lit?” demanded Uncle Buck snappishly.

“Crows.”

“Well, what if they have? They know enough to get down out of the sun. Come in here, ’Quar’us, with us. I can hear what few brains you’ve got sizzlin’ like a pan o’ tomcod a-fryin’!”

“Over the hills! Crows a-flyin’ and crows a-watch-in’! Hard times comin’, that’s what I guess.”

“I s’pose there’s really a name for that—that—well, the sense for knowin’ that somethin’ is comin’ in the weather line or mebbe the line o’ trouble,” pursued Amazeen, puffing meditatively. It was a placid afternoon for quiet and contemplative discourse of this sort.

Little breezes wavered along the shady side of Brickett’s store and stirred the grasses. Other breezes skylarked through the wide-open front doors of the store and came out at the side door near the old men. Inside the store the breezes did what the people of Palermo usually did when they visited Brickett’s emporium—they swapped commodities. The breezes brought their little treasures of pure, salty fragrance from the cove and took away queer little whiffs of spices that were stacked in wooden boxes, sickish-sweet scents from the tobacco “figs,” aroma of coffee and tea, flavourings from the candy show case and more pungent odours of kerosene and dried herring.

“Now a dog,” stated Amazeen, “don’t really have no common sense like human bein’s, but then a dog knows when any one’s goin’ to die in a neighbourhood, and don’t he git out front o’ the house and stick his nose straight up in the air and lally-hoo till some one kicks him gallywest? That’s a sense of knowin’ ahead o’ time, and he’s born with it—and that’s somethin’ how ’tis with ’Quar’us. Them as says he’s just loony ain’t watched him same’s I have.”

The old man on the platform had shifted his legs again. The breeze fluttered his long hair and the sun was stealing the last of the original colour from his yellowed garments. The men in the shade were silent, partly from slumbrous laziness, partly because their slow minds were once again revolving one of their stock problems: What mysterious faculty of divination did “Hard-Times” Wharff possess?

“There ain’t no disputin’ that he’s foretold full a dozen line gales that was comin’ to rip the stuffin’ out o’ things ’long the coast,” said Brickett. “That much we all know! Time the school-house was burned down he had it all predicted out—leastways, he told ’round that the critter with red tongue and crackling teeth and all out doors for a gizzard was comin’ towards our village—and that’s a fire, ain’t it? He’s seen shrouds in candles for fifty fam’lies in P’lermo, I’ll bet you, just come to count ’em up! There’s somethin’—somethin’—‘lectricity—or hypnotickism, or somethin’! These scientists will git it figured out some day!”

They all pondered in silence, the hush of the sultry afternoon drowsily brooding. In the store shed a stub-tailed horse dozed uneasily between the thills of Dow Babb’s beach waggon, occasionally thudding his hoof in the soft soil, trying to dislodge the clustering flies. Somewhere in the maple tree the cicada whirred in long, shrill diminuendo.

“I ain’t no sp’tu’list or nothin’ of that sort,” broke out Uncle Buck. “And I don’t b’lieve in no sech things like you’re talkin’ about, nor that any Wharff that ever lived was anything except cracked—like that old one-legged her’n out there,” he added, directing an eye of disfavour on Aquarius. “I tell you if they could cast mists in the old times, then why can’t they do it now, when everything is so much improved—-telefoams and telegraphts and ’lectric cars and all that? Any man that ever claimed to see a rooster haul off a log was a dum liar if he said so.”

Dow Babb flipped his legs together indignantly.

“’Tain’t any particular politeness to call my rel’tives names, is it?” he demanded. “Furdermore, uncle never said he see the rooster act’ly haul a log; he said it looked as if he had done it, ’cause the mist had been cast.”

“Ain’t nothin’ in it no one way or t’other,” persisted Uncle Buck doggedly. “’Tain’t reasonable, ’tain’t Christian, and whatever ’tis it’s works of Satan, and I, as a church member, ain’t goin’ to stand by and let things like that be said without aye, yes or no to ’em!” He thudded his fist on his knee.

“I’ll bet there is such things as magic and—aw—well, you can call it witchcraft,” cried Babb, rather hampered in argument by lack of terms. “Come now, I’ll bet you!”

“What do you propose to do—call up your Uncle Ben from Turtle Knoll graveyard or—or leave it out to old Wind-cutter, there?” queried Buck, sarcastically, with a hook of his thumb toward the Palermo human weather vane.

Babb was clearly nonplussed for a moment, but his face suddenly lighted up. He untangled his legs, crawled out of his chair and cried:

“I’ll leave it out to the man that P’lermo is always ready to leave out all questions to—and that’s Squire Phin Look, by thunder!”

He shook his skinny finger at the dingy windows over Brickett’s store.

“If he don’t know there ain’t nobody does,” observed Brickett, clicking his yellow teeth with decision.

“Why should he know? ’Tain’t law, nor nothin’ that goes with law,” persisted Buck.

“You see if he don’t know,” retorted Babb. “It wa’n’t lo’din’ a jackass with books when Squire Look went through college. Now let’s go up and ask him, boys—what ye say?”

“Oh, holler to him to come down here,” drawled Amazeen, loath to leave his seat. “There ain’t chairs enough in his office to go ’round amongst us—and I’ve been sick of the smell of law books ever since I lost my bound’ry line case.”

Therefore Babb threw back his head and bawled huskily, “Squire Phin! Squire Phin Look!” From his mouth, as from the mouths of all Palermo, the title sounded like “Square.” At the second call they heard a chair’s legs pushed squeakingly on the floor and an answering bellow that was jovial though wordless. And those who had straightened up to listen lounged lazily down again to wait for him.

A rickety outside stairway led up to the Squire’s office.

On the old tin sign between the dusty front windows was:

PHINEAS LOOK

Attorney and Notary

The purr of the coffee grinder in the store beneath was a frequent obbligato to the conferences between Squire Phin and his clients, and the savour of spice and odour of kerosene stole up through the floor cracks to mingle with the decidedly athletic fragrance of the Squire’s blackened T. D. pipe.

Once he forgot one of those sooty-hued pipes and left it in the attorney’s room at county court, and the young lawyers got ribbons and hung it from a chandelier with a card reading, “Erected in Memory of Phin Look.” Squire Look patiently hunted for that pipe when he went to county court again, for its stoutness, after many months of careful seasoning, appealed to his taste. But he never looked as high as the chandelier.

Folks who knew Squire Phin well declared that he had never looked high enough in life—not as high as his merits entitled. Men who understood such things said that he knew enough law to match any judge on the State bench, but in middle life he was still sitting up in his little office over Brickett’s store, smoking his pipe and reading his fat law books, with their shiny, hand-smooched bindings.

“Well, boys!” he said, as he came out upon the landing above them and leaned over the rail. “What do you want to do—nominate me for Congress at a mass-meeting?”

Without waiting for a reply he jammed a round-topped straw hat upon his thick hair and came down the stairs with solid tread. A fat and fuzzy old dog followed on his heels with tread comically similar. “I had two of ’em once,” he was wont to say, “Eli and Uli, but I gave away Uli to another lawyer and kept Eli.”

“They say, Squire Look,” began Uncle Buck, as soon as the lawyer came within hearing, “that you can tell us whether old ‘Hard-Times’ there ought to be hitched up on town hall cupoly as a vane or sent to the insane ’sylum.”

“It ain’t fair to put it that way,” remonstrated Dow Babb, and he proceeded to state the point of contention.

The two deep lines on either side of the Squire’s straight mouth curved away, and his round, smooth-shaven face beamed upon them humorously.

“It isn’t the first time, gentlemen,” he said, “that the motives of a philanthropist have been misconstrued by the people to whom he has presented himself and his services.”

“What I contend,” broke in Dow Babb, “is that ’Quar’us has a sort of seventh sense to smell happening ahead. I don’t know what to call it, but it’s like what a dog has to make him go to howlin’ when some one’s goin’ to die.”

“Well, you ought to ask Eli about that,” suggested the Squire, his smile broader. “That seems to be right in his line,” and then, looking down into the humid eyes of the dog, he asked, “Eli, why do you howl when some one is going to die?”

The canine, who was squatting on the grass, thumped his tail agitatedly and uttered a short “Wuff!”

“Can you talk dog well enough to understand?” asked the lawyer of Buck.

“Now, Squire,” pleaded Babb whiningly, “you tell us straight. This ain’t foolin’. We ain’t been able to coax the old sir off’n that platform so fur this afternoon. He was like that on the days before the line storms and on them other times. He don’t act out a weather vane usually more’n a half hour on a stretch and then sets down and chaws tobacker with us like a human bein’!”

“You’ve asked me some pretty tough questions,” said the lawyer, dismissing his jocularity. He leaned the shiny shoulders of his threadbare frock coat against the clapboards, careless of the white smooches that were immediately transferred to the cloth. “Now, as to the casting of a mist by the old chaps we have heard of in this section, I’ll say that perhaps they had the same power as some of the Hindoos that travellers describe. Men whose words ought to be good assert that to all appearances some of those fellows throw the end of a rope into the air and climb up and up, and so out of sight.”

Uncle Buck pronged a mighty chew of tobacco out of the side of his jaw with his tongue and tossed it afar into the milkweed stalks that grew beside the horse shed. He snorted his unbelief.

“You might just as soon tell me,” he declared, “as how that quid o’ mine could turn into a royal Bengal tiger and come roarin’ back here to chaw me up.”

“I wisht a plug o’ tobacker would chase you once,” declared Amazeen. “P’raps you wouldn’t be borrowin’ so much of it all the time if you got one good scare.”

Squire Phin was evidently about to explain to his fellow townsmen more explicitly regarding the mysteries of the East, as related by veracious investigators, when he was interrupted by the cause of all the argument.

“Hard-Times” Wharff suddenly came down upon both feet, put his hand to his brow, peered up the highway where it snaked into the distant spruce growth, and cried in a very human tone of rural astonishment:

“Well, dod-butter doughnuts, holes and all, ’tain’t no wonder the crows kept a-flyin’! Hard times is a-comin’ to town a-ridin’ on a pony. Come here and see ’em!”

Led by Babb, striding on legs that worked like calipers, the old men flocked around the corner of the store into the sunshine, each uttering his own characteristic note of astonishment as he swung into view of the road.

Squire Phin leisurely followed. But the spectacle in the highway was sufficient to make him stare at the approaching procession with surprise that almost equalled the emotion of his more naÏve townsmen.