putterings 194 < 195 > 196 index
season after season be-still tinkered
... such
He heard her proposition season after season, and
another little den as the paternal domicile, and be-
still tinkered at his blacksmithing. The prairie got
come proprietor of another “puttering” man like
into his head....
—
OCR cross-column confusion, of the delightful (alas anonymous) “Zigler's Patent” in Frank Leslie’s Pleasant Hours 28:1 (February 1880) : 90-92 (91) : link
same (NYPL copy, at hathitrust)
from which —
When Mrs. Zigler married Zigler, she really expected he would amount to something. She had a right to expect it. She had been a schoolmistress, and was a sharp, precocious woman. Zigler was a blacksmith, and the iron had entered her soul since she married him.
A small way of living was endurable at first—Mrs. ZIgler was used to that—but when it went on getting smaller and smaller, and Zigler neglected work to moon for ever about patents, it became unendurable, and Mrs. Zigler kept the iron hot, if her husband did not.
They were rich in children, and her Yankee knack clothed and fed them out of the smallest possible income. But by the time Ada, the oldest girl, was fifteen, Mrs. Zigler felt that she could bear hear mean circumstances in her native Connecticut village no longer.
Abijah Zigler was bound to ruin his family, and he might do it at once and have it done. He had invented scores of things, which either he got patented and could not get sold, or patented so that some luckier man could evade his rights by an additional fixture, and sell his own idea over his head.
These things oppressed Abijah; he was a dreaming, groping man. He wanted to live at peace with everybody, but his own tastes and instincts were so strong that he could not run counter to them.
Mrs Zigler’s sixteen years of talk only scarred his life, but in nowise changed its bent after invention. He entertained much respect for, and dread of her, however, believing her to be superior to himself as an individual...
“...And here’s Ada — New England born, and more makings in her than that Harness girl’ll hever have — she’ll have nothing, and neither will the other children, if you don’
“Heh?” replied Abijah, looking at her vacantly; he had not heard a word...
family moves to Hooperstown, in the prairie... turns out well in the end.