There is an old man, selling the meats of butternuts under the stoop of
the hotel. He makes that his station during a part of the season. He
was dressed in a dark thin coat, ribbed velvet pantaloons, and a sort of
moccasons, or shoes, appended to the legs of woollen stockings. He had
on a straw hat, and his hair was gray, with a long, thin visage. His
nuts were contained in a square tin box, having two compartments, one for
the nuts, and another for maple sugar, which he sells in small cakes. He
had three small tin measures for nuts,--one at one cent, others at two,
four, and six cents; and as fast as they were emptied, he filled them
again, and put them on the top of his box. He smoked a pipe, and talked
with one man about whether it would be worth while to grow young again,
and the duty of being contented with old age; about predestination and
freewill and other metaphysics. I asked him what his sales amounted to
in the course of a day. He said that butternuts did not sell so well as
walnuts, which are not yet in season; that he might to-day have sold
fifty cents' worth of walnuts, never less than a dollar's worth, often
more; and when he went round with a caravan, he had sold fifteen dollars'
worth per day, and once as much as twenty dollars' worth.
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