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Page 39
There was a few minutes' silence, and then Mr. Dickey said impatiently,
"We're all ready, Uncle Jabez. Why don't you fire away, so's to be
through by ten o'clock?"
"I was a-thinkin' which one I'd best tell him," said Uncle Jabez mildly.
"They're all convincin' to a mind that's open to convincement, but I'd
like to pick out the one that's most so."
"There's the one about Alviry Pratt's grandfather," suggested Mr.
Crumlish encouragingly.
"No," mused the old man. "I've no doubt of that myself, but then it
didn't happen to me in person, and I've a notion he'd rather hear one
I've experienced than two I've heard tell of."
"Of course I would, Uncle Jabez," said Mr. Birchard kindly, but with an
amused twinkle in his eyes. "You take your own time: it's only just
struck nine, and there's no hurry at all."
"Supposin' I was to tell him that one about my first wife?" said the old
man presently, and with an inquiring look around the circle.
Several heads were nodded approvingly, and Mr. Crumlish said, "The very
one I'd 'a' chosen myself if you'd ast me."
Thus encouraged, Uncle Jabez, with a sort of deliberate promptness,
began: "We married very young, Lavina and me,--too young, some said, but
I never could see why, for I had a good farm, with health and strength
to carry it on, and she was a master-hand with butter and cheese. At any
rate, we thriv; and if we had plenty of children, there was plenty for
'em to eat, and they grew as fast as everything else did. She wasn't
what you'd fairly call handsome, Lavina wasn't, but she was
pleasant-appearin', very,--plump as a pa'tridge, with nice brown hair
and eyes and a clean-lookin' skin. But it was her smile in particular
that took me; and when she set in to laugh you couldn't no more' help
laughin' along with her than one bobolink can help laughin' back when he
hears another. She was the tenderest-hearted woman that ever breathed
the breath of life: she couldn't bear to hurt the feelin's of a cat, and
she'd go 'ithout a chicken-dinner any day sooner'n kill a chicken. As
time passed on and she begun to age a little, she grew stouter 'n'
stouter; but it didn't seem to worry her none. She'd puff and blow a
good bit when she went up-stairs, but she'd always laugh about it, and
say that when we was rich enough we'd put in an elevator, like they had
at a big hotel we saw once. It would suit her fine, she said, to set
down on a cushioned seat and be up-stairs afore she could git up again.
Now, you needn't think I'm wanderin' from the p'int," and Uncle Jabez
looked severely at Mr. Dickey, who was manifestly fidgeting. "All you
folks that have lived about here all your lives knew Lavina 'ithout my
tellin' you this; but Mr. Birchard he's a stranger in the neighborhood,
and it's needful to the understandin' of my story that he should know
just what sort of a woman she was,--or is, as I should say."
Mr. Dickey subsided, while Mr. Birchard tried to throw still more of an
expression of the deepest interest and attention into his face. He must
have succeeded, for the old man, going on with his story, fixed his eyes
more and more frequently upon those of the young one. They were large,
gentle, appealing blue eyes, with a mildly surprised expression, which
Mr. Birchard found exceedingly attractive. Whether or not the fact that
the youngest of Uncle Jabez's children, a daughter, had precisely
similar eyes, in any way accounted for the attraction, I leave to minds
more astute than my own.
"You may think," the narrator resumed, when he felt that he had settled
Mr. Dickey, "whether or not you'd miss a woman like that, when you'd
summered and wintered with her more'n forty year. She always said she
hoped she'd go sudden, for she was so heavy it would 'a' took three or
four of the common run of folks to lift her, and she dreaded a long
sickness. Well, she was took at her word. We was settin', as it might be
now, one on one side the fire, the other on t'other, in the big
easy-cheers that Samuel--that's our oldest son, and a good boy, if I do
say it--had sent us with the fust spare money he had. She'd been
laughin' and jokin', as she so often did, five minutes afore.
Gracie--she was a little thing then, and, bein' the youngest, a little
sassy and sp'iled, mebbe--had been on a trip to the city, and she'd
brought her ma a present of a shoe-buttoner with a handle a full foot
long.
"'There, ma,' she says, laughin' up in her mother's face; 'you was
complainin' about the distance it seemed to be to your feet: here's a
kind of a telegraft-pole to shorten it a little.'
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