Of this "Fatty" Freeman was fully assured. Fatty Freeman
was a young man for whose opinion older men were accustomed to wait. His
person more than justified his praenomen, for Mr. Harper Freeman, Jr.,
was undeniably fat. "Fat, but fine and frisky," was ever his own comment
upon the descriptive adjective by which his friends distinguished him.
And fine and frisky he was; fine in his appreciation of good eating,
fine in his judgment of good cattle and fine in his estimate of men;
frisky, too, and utterly irrepressible. "Harp's just like a young pup,"
his own father, the Reverend Harper Freeman, the old Methodist minister
of the Maplehill circuit, used to say. "If Harp had a tail he would
never do anything but play with it." On this, however, it is difficult
to hold any well based opinion. Ebullient in his spirits, he radiated
cheeriness wherever he went and was at the bottom of most of the
practical jokes that kept the village of Maplehill in a state of
ferment; yet if any man thought to turn a sharp corner in business with
Mr. Harper Freeman, Jr., he invariably found that frisky individual
waiting for him round the corner with a cheery smile of welcome, shrewd
and disconcerting. It was this cheery shrewdness of his that made him
the most successful cattle buyer in the county and at the same time
secretary of the Middlesex Caledonian Society.
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