`` Honestly , I do n't know what I think of it , '' I answered frankly . Miss Calista 's Peppermint Bottle Miss Calista was perplexed . Her nephew , Caleb Cramp , who had been her right-hand man for years and whom she had got well broken into her ways , had gone to the Klondike , leaving her to fill his place with the next best man ; but the next best man was slow to appear , and meanwhile Miss Calista was looking about her warily . She could afford to wait a while , for the crop was all in and the fall ploughing done , so that the need of a successor to Caleb was not as pressing as it might otherwise have been . There was no lack of applicants , such as they were . Miss Calista was known to be a kind and generous mistress , although she had her `` ways , '' and insisted calmly and immovably upon wholehearted compliance with them . She had a small , well-cultivated farm and a comfortable house , and her hired men lived in clover . Caleb Cramp had been perfection after his kind , and Miss Calista did not expect to find his equal . Nevertheless , she set up a certain standard of requirements ; and although three weeks , during which Miss Calista had been obliged to put up with the immature services of a neighbour 's boy , had elapsed since Caleb 's departure , no one had as yet stepped into his vacant and coveted shoes . Certainly Miss Calista was somewhat hard to please , but she was not thinking of herself as she sat by her front window in the chilly November twilight . Instead , she was musing on the degeneration of hired men , and reflecting that it was high time the wheat was thrashed , the house banked , and sundry other duties attended to . Ches Maybin had been up that afternoon to negotiate for the vacant place , and had offered to give satisfaction for smaller wages than Miss Calista had ever paid . But he had met with a brusque refusal , scarcely as civil as Miss Calista had bestowed on drunken Jake Stinson from the Morrisvale Road . Not that Miss Calista had any particular prejudice against Ches Maybin , or knew anything positively to his discredit . She was simply unconsciously following the example of a world that exerts itself to keep a man down when he is down and prevent all chance of his rising . Nothing succeeds like success , and the converse of this is likewise true -- that nothing fails like failure . There was not a person in Cooperstown who would not have heartily endorsed Miss Calista 's refusal . Ches Maybin was only eighteen , although he looked several years older , and although no flagrant misdoing had ever been proved against him , suspicion of such was not wanting . He came of a bad stock , people said sagely , adding that what was bred in the bone was bound to come out in the flesh . His father , old Sam Maybin , had been a shiftless and tricky rascal , as everybody knew , and had ended his days in the poorhouse .
Ches 's mother had died when he was a baby , and he had come up somehow , XXXXX a hand-to-mouth fashion , with all the cloud of heredity hanging over him .
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