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 , in a hand-to-mouth fashion , with all the cloud of heredity hanging over him . He was always looked at askance , and when any mischief came to light in the village , it was generally fastened on him as a convenient and handy scapegoat . He was considered sulky and lazy , and the local prophets united in predicting a bad end for him sooner or later ; and , moreover , diligently endeavoured by their general treatment of him to put him in a fair way to fulfil their predictions . Miss Calista , when she had shut Chester Maybin out into the chill gloom of the November dusk , dismissed him from her thoughts . There were other things of more moment to her just then than old Sam Maybin 's hopeful son . There was nobody in the house but herself , and although this was neither alarming nor unusual , it was unusual -- and Miss Calista considered it alarming -- that the sum of five hundred dollars should at that very moment be in the upper right-hand drawer of the sideboard , which sum had been up to the previous day safe in the coffers of the Millageville bank . But certain unfavourable rumours were in course of circulation about that same institution , and Miss Calista , who was nothing if not prudent , had gone to the bank that very morning and withdrawn her deposit . She intended to go over to Kerrytown the very next day and deposit it in the Savings Bank there . Not another day would she keep it in the house , and , indeed , it worried her to think she must keep it even for the night , as she had told Mrs. Galloway that afternoon during a neighbourly back-yard chat .
`` Not but what it 's safe enough , '' she said , `` XXXXX not a soul but you knows I 've got it .
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