In the course of a few days after the election, Mr. Hoskins and his wife, with a great cargo of wares and other notions in their wagons, arrived from Vermont. They had been upwards of three weeks on the road, and the old lady had suffered greatly from the joltings of the crossways in the journey; nor had her husband endured less, but, being a man of few words, we heard less of it. I saw, however, that he moved with anguish, and was not for some days even disposed to enter into conversation, but went crippling about the door with his hand on his hip, uttering every now and then a sharp and peevish “Ah!”

At last, he said one morning, “This will not serve; we must set to work;” and then he told me what he had brought for the store, having sold his farm and betterments to good advantage. Accordingly, the first thing to be done was to get the town lot, which we had previously chosen in the area allotted for the market-place of the village, cleared, and to contract for the erection of a building suitable for a store;—all this was soon done. In the course of less than a fortnight we were in possession, and furnishing ourselves with a goodly display of real articles, very different from the brickbats and knobs of wood with which my first store in New York was so creditably adorned; for Mr. Hoskins, as the reader already knows, was a man of true substance, and brought with him more than three thousand dollars’ worth of excellent goods, selected with sagacity.

From the beginning of time, there had not been such a store as ours opened for many a mile around in the country, of which Babelmandel was the centre; nor was it long till we felt the profitable effects of keeping back the merchandise purchased at Olympus, for by so doing it caused the settlers to talk concerning us and our plans, and restrained many amongst them from sending for supplies elsewhere, and to hold off from buying until they should see what our general assortments were likely to be.