Skim, her small son, helped her as far as he was able, and between them
they managed things so frugally that at the end of eight years the widow
still had her five hundred dollars capital, and the little store had
paid her living expenses.
Skim was named after his uncle, Peter Skimbley, who owned a farm near
Watertown. The widow's hopeful was now a lank, pale-faced youth of
eighteen, whose most imposing features were his big hands and a long
nose that ended in a sharp point. The shop had ruined him for manual
labor, for he sat hunched up by the stove in winter, and in summer hung
around Cotting's store and listened to the gossip of the loungers. He
was a boy of small conversational powers, but his mother declared that
Skim "done a heap o' thinkin' that nobody suspected."
The widow was a good gossip herself, and knew all the happenings in the
little town. She had a habit of reading all her stock of paper-covered
novels before she sold them, and her mind was stocked with the mass of
romance and adventure she had thus absorbed. "What I loves more'n eat'n'
or sleep'n'," she often said, "is a rattlin' good love story. There
don't seem to be much love in real life, so a poor lone crittur like me
has to calm her hankerin's by a-readin' novels."
No one had been more interested in the advent of the millionaire at the
Wegg farm than the widow Clark.
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