The woman turned in at one of the first of the little houses that suddenly began to crowd the road at the foot of the next hill, and she had no children at all, so she informed the inquiring Bob. She kept a store. That is to say, a big table was set across the room, just inside the open door of her cottage, and on this improvised counter she was arranging her wares when the visitors came up with her. The girls found that there were any number of these little shops in Grant's Town. Every morning the proprietors, starting often before daylight, went down to the market for supplies, and the neighborhood saved itself the long walk through the sun by patronizing the little local stores. Other negro women carried their heaped-up trays through the white settlement, bringing to their regular customers the choicest fruits and vegetables that the day's market afforded. So it soon grew to seem perfectly natural to see eggs, oranges, tomatoes, and other kinds of "rolling stock," as Mary flippantly named them, carried about on the heads of graceful, swiftly moving negresses, who stopped to chat with their friends, laughed, talked, turned their heads unconcernedly this way and that, but never spilled anything.