V
FIFTEEN DOLLARS' WORTH
THE Janse farm, if you could call it a farm, was a lonesome place. I'm pretty well acquainted with lonesome places. My business is sellin' pretty things to women and children at their houses, and my territory covers the out-lyin' districts, where it ain't very convenient for the women to get to the towns.
The Janse place was less than fifty miles from Boston, I know, but, honest, you'd never guess it as you stood on the tumble-down front steps of the little house, and cast your eyes out over the long flat meadows stretchin' away towards the west, as far as you could see, with never a sign of a road, or a house, or a scrap of cultivated land to let you know there was somebody alive besides yourself, this side of the horizon. 'Twa'n't a very lively place for a young girl to live. The road the house stood on ended up in a peat-meadow. There was a little cemetery where nobody was ever buried any more just before you
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