There Was A
Long Bough Of An Elm Hanging Over One Gable Just Like The Forelock.
His
face was a blank, like the broad end wall of the cottage, which had no
window - at least
You might think so until you looked up and discovered
one little arrow slit, one narrow pane, and woke with a start to the idea
that Job was always up there watching and listening. That was how he
looked out of his one eye so intensely cunning, the other being a wall
eye - that is, the world supposed so, as he kept it half shut, always
between the lights; but whether it was really blind or not I cannot say.
Job caught rats and rabbits and moles, and bought fagots or potatoes, or
fruit or rabbit-skins, or rusty iron: wonderful how he seemed to have
command of money. It was done probably by buying and selling almost
simultaneously, so that the cash passed really from one customer to
another, and was never his at all. Also he worked as a labourer, chiefly
piecework; also Mrs. Job had a shop window about two feet square: snuff
and tobacco, bread and cheese, immense big round jumbles and sugar, kept
on the floor above, and reached down by hand, when wanted, through the
opening for the ladder stairs. The front door - Job's right hand - was
always open in summer, and the flagstones of the floor chalked round
their edges; a clean table, clean chairs, decent crockery, an old clock
about an hour slow, a large hearth with a minute fire to boil the kettle
without heating the room.
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