Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 July 1879 — Eccentricities of a Yankee Shopkeeper. [ARTICLE]

Eccentricities of a Yankee Shopkeeper.

We have recently heard of a character in a New Hampshire town whose personality smacks of individuality and independence so strongly that we wonder of what original spring he has had a monopoly te the exclusion of his more ordinary neighbors. This man keeps a “general store.” He has kept this same store for twenty years, and one would almost say the same stock, judging from its thoroughly mixed up condition and the literal accumulation of dust. He hires no attendant, but does all the work of buying and selling himself. Of course he cannot always be in the store; he must sometimes eat, like other people. When he has occasion to go away, he goes and locks up the store. He locks up the storey when he is ill; he locks it up when he/ comes to Boston to buy goods. li/ spite of this irregular proceeding he has acquired money, and not a little too. But the really queer thing about the man and his store remains to be told. In one comer, more dusty than anything else in the place, stand two * demijohns. There they have stood since the first year this man began business. They were brought by an old countryman to be filled with molasses and vinnegar. As he took one in each hand to .carry them to his cart at the door, he said he would settle sos them the next week when he came down. But the storekeeper had a better plan, and suggested mildly that the jugs better be left, too, till the next, week, when their contents could be ’ paid for. “All right,” responded the countryman, and he set jugs down and went away. . And there these vessels have stood ever since, and have,never been emptied.—[Boston Herald.