"
"Called any votes?" asked Nicholas.
"Well, no," said Caleb, scraping his chin. "I guess we're sort o'
takin' the sense o' the meetin'."
"Good deal like a quiltin' so fur," remarked Brad Freeman indulgently.
"All gab an' no git there!"
"They tell me," said Uncle Eli Pike, approaching Nicholas as if he had
something to confide, "that out west, where they have them new-fangled
clocks, they're all lighted up with 'lectricity."
"Do they so?" asked Caleb, but Nicholas returned, with an unwonted
fierceness:--
"Does that go to the right spot with you? Do you want to see a
clock-face starin' over Tiverton, like a full moon, chargin' ye to keep
Old War-Wool Eaton in memory?"
"Well, no," replied Eli gently, "I dunno's I do, an' I dunno _but_ I
do."
"Might set a lantern back' o' the dial, an' take turns lightin' on 't,"
suggested Brad Freeman.
"Might carve out a jack-o'-lantern like Old Eaton's face," supplemented
Tom O'Neil irreverently.
"Well," concluded Rivers, "I guess, when all's said and done, we might
as well take the clock, an' bell, too. When a man makes a fair offer,
it's no more 'n civil to close with it. Ye can't rightly heave it back
ag'in."
"My argyment is," put in Ebenezer Tolman, who knew how to lay dollar by
dollar, "if he's willin' to do one thing for the town, he's willin' to
do another.
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