On
his way home he stopped at the store for a bottle of harness oil, and
catching the red glow of the fire beyond the threshold of the public
room, he went in for a moment to ask old Adam Doolittle about a supply
of hominy meal he had ready for him at the mill. As the ancient man
crouched over the fire, with his bent hands outstretched and his
few silvery hairs rising in the warmth, his profile showed with the
exaggeration of a twelfth century grotesque, the features so distorted
by the quivering shadows that his beaked nose appeared to rest in the
crescent-shaped silhouette of his chin. His mouth was open, and
from time to time he shook his head and muttered to himself in an
undertone--a habit he had fallen into during the monotonous stretches
of Mr. Mullen's sermons. Across from him sat Jim Halloween, and in the
middle of the hearth, Solomon Hatch stood wiping the frost from his face
with a red cotton handkerchief.
"It's time you were thinkin' about goin' home, I reckon, old Adam,"
remarked Mrs. Bottom. "You've had yo' two glasses of cider an' it ain't
proper for a man of yo' years to be knockin' around arter dark.
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