Here is what the page has done for Matteson's Hardware, counted honestly. I kept a spiral notebook in the drawer under the register from the first day, and every e-mail and every order that came through the page got a line in it. These are the totals through the end of August 1999.

The E-mail: 240 Letters

That's a little over four a week. Here is what they wanted:

What I take from it: 147 of the 240 were the same two questions, whether we're open and whether we've got it. If your page answers those two plainly, it's done most of its job. I added a line about mud-season Sundays after the fourth letter asking about them in one April week.

The "everything else" pile is my favorite. A boy in Ohio wanted to know how many nails are in a pound (it depends on the nail; a pound of 16-penny commons is a little under fifty). A woman in New Jersey asked if we'd hold a snow shovel for her until Christmas. We did.

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The Orders: Nine Phone Calls

Every order the page brought in came by telephone, from somebody out of state, and every one of them was for a wood-stove part. Older stoves outlive the stores that sold them, and the owners go looking. Not one local customer has ordered through the page; they just come in.

(Prices are what we charged then, before shipping. The two door gasket kits were for different stoves with different sized doors, which is why they don't match.)

That's not a living. It's not even a good week in October. But every one of those nine people called back for something else, or sent a neighbor, and the fellow in Michigan called again this September, mostly to ask how our winter looked.

And it's why I'm glad I didn't put a credit-card setup on the page. If I'd paid what I was quoted, those nine orders would have cost me money.

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The Evenings: Sixty Hours

Same notebook, back pages. Time spent on the page, building it and keeping it up, counted to the nearest hour:

Take away the twelve hours of building and it's 48 hours of upkeep over about sixty weeks, a little under fifty minutes a week. That matches what it feels like. In dollars the page has cost us nothing but two rolls of film and a box of floppy disks.

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The Legal Pad, Again

In April of 1998 I asked a hundred customers whether they had the Internet at home or at work, and thirty-one said yes. This August I did it again, same way, same pad, the first hundred through the door starting on a Monday. Forty-four said yes. That's thirteen more out of a hundred in sixteen months, in a town where the nearest stoplight is twenty miles off. I don't know where it stops. I'll ask again next summer.

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The Letter

If you asked me whether all of this was worth sixty hours, I'd show you one e-mail. It came in February from Mrs. Edna Wallace, who is seventy-six and lives in Arizona now. She grew up on a farm three miles out of Coldbrook, and her granddaughter had found our page and printed it out for her.

She wrote that her father bought his sap buckets from my grandfather every spring, and that when she was six, Charlie Matteson gave her a peppermint stick from the jar by the register and told her not to tell her brothers. She wanted to know if the bell over the door was the same one. It is. I rang it into the telephone for her when she called the next week, and she cried, and so, I will admit, did I.

A month later a brown envelope came in the mail. Inside was a snapshot her father took in 1941: the store, a team of horses at the hitching rail, and my grandfather on the step in his apron. It's the best photograph of the store anybody ever took. It's in the drawer with my roll of film, waiting on my nephew's scanner, and when it goes up it's going at the top of the page, where the storefront was supposed to be all along.

Mrs. Wallace said I could tell this story here. She also said to tell you the peppermint was the best she ever had, and she has had a good many since.

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