The Teacher - Page 2

of the school teacher, who
by her words had stirred something within him, and
later of Helen White, the slim daughter of the town
banker, with whom he had been for a long time half in
love.

By nine o'clock of that evening snow lay deep in the
streets and the weather had become bitter cold. It was
difficult to walk about. The stores were dark and the
people had crawled away to their houses. The evening
train from Cleveland was very late but nobody was
interested in its arrival. By ten o'clock all but four
of the eighteen hundred citizens of the town were in
bed.

Hop Higgins, the night watchman, was partially awake.
He was lame and carried a heavy stick. On dark nights
he carried a lantern. Between nine and ten o'clock he
went his rounds. Up and down Main Street he stumbled
through the drifts trying the doors of the stores. Then
he went into alleyways and tried the back doors.
Finding all tight he hurried around the corner to the
New Willard House and beat on the door. Through the
rest of the night he intended to stay by the stove.
"You go to bed. I'll keep the stove going," he said to
the boy who slept on a cot in the hotel office.

Hop Higgins sat down by the stove and took off his
shoes. When the boy had gone to sleep he began to think
of his own affairs. He intended to paint his house in
the spring and sat by the stove calculating the cost of
paint and labor. That led him into other calculations.
The night watchman was sixty years old and wanted to
retire. He had been a soldier in the Civil War and drew
a small pension. He hoped to find some new method of
making a living and aspired to become a professional
breeder of ferrets. Already he had four of the
strangely shaped savage little creatures, that are used
by sportsmen in the pursuit of rabbits, in the cellar
of his house. "Now I have one male and three females,"
he mused. "If I am lucky by spring I shall have twelve
or fifteen. In another year I shall be able to begin
advertising ferrets for sale in the sporting papers."

The nightwatchman settled into his chair and his mind
became a blank. He did not sleep. By years of practice
he had trained himself to sit for hours through the
long nights neither asleep nor awake. In the morning he
was almost as refreshed as though he had slept.

With Hop Higgins safely stowed away in the chair behind
the stove only three people were awake in Winesburg.
George Willard was in the office of the Eagle
pretending to be at work on the writing of a story but
in reality continuing the mood of the morning by the
fire in the wood. In the bell tower of the Presbyterian
Church the Reverend Curtis Hartman was