Part 18 (2/2)
”Ah! how do you do?” said he, in a soft, deliberate half-whisper, as Father Brighthopes addressed him.
With his right hand,--having carefully wiped it upon his pantaloons, or rather pantaloon, for his luck in war enabled him to do with half a pair,--he greeted the old clergyman modestly and respectfully, while with his left he raised his steel-bowed gla.s.ses from his nose.
”My friend,” said Father Brighthopes, ”you seem industriously at work, this morning.”
”Pegging away,--pegging away!” replied Job, with a childlike smile.
”Always pegging, you know.”
There was an evident attempt at so much more cheerfulness in his voice than he really felt, that the effect was quite touching.
”That's my mother,” he added, as the clergyman turned to shake hands with a wrinkled, unconscious-looking object, who sat wrapped in an old blanket, in a rocking-chair. ”A kind old woman, but very deaf. You'll have to speak loud.”
”Good-morning, mother,” cried Father Brighthopes, raising his voice, and taking her withered hand.
The old woman seemed to start up from a sort of dream, and a feeble gleam of intelligence crossed her seamed and bloodless features, as she fixed her watery eye upon the clergyman.
”Oh, yes!” she cried, mumbling the shrill words between her toothless gums, ”I remember all about it. Sally's darter was born on the tenth of June, in eighteen-four. Her husband's mother was a Higgins.”
The clergyman smiled upon her sadly, nodded a.s.sent, and, laying her hand gently upon her lap, turned away.
”Her mind's a runnin' on old times, and she don't hear a word you say, sir,” observed Job, in his peculiar half-whisper, slow, subdued, but very distinct. ”She don't take much notice o' what's goin' on now-days, and we have to screech to her to make her understand anything. A kind old lady, sir, but past her time, and very deaf.”
Mr. Royden squeezed a drop of moisture out of his eye, and coughed.
Meanwhile the aged woman relapsed into the dreamy state from which she had been momentarily aroused, drawing the dingy blanket around her cold limbs, and whispering over some dim memory of the century gone by.
XV.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF A WOODEN LEG.
”You have a good trade, friend Bowen,” said Father Brighthopes, drawing his chair near the shoemaker's bench.
”It does capital for me!” replied Job, cheerfully. ”Since I got a bayonet through my knee at Lundy's Lane, I find I get on best in the world sittin' still.”
He smiled pleasantly over this feeble attempt at humor, and arranged some waxed ends, which, for convenience, he had hung upon his wooden leg.
”Did you learn shoe-making before you went soldiering?” asked the clergyman.
”I'd been a 'prentice. But I tired of the monotony. So I quarreled with my trade, and fought my _last_ at Lundy's Lane, as I tell people,” said Job, with twinkling eyes.
”You got the worst of it?”
”All things considered I did. This fighting is bad business; and, you see, I decidedly put my foot in it.”
Job touched his wooden leg significantly, to ill.u.s.trate the joke.
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