第22章 CHAPTER VII(2)

"Lay off your overcoat, Washington, and draw up to the stove and make yourself at home--just consider yourself under your own shingles my boy--I'll have a fire going, in a jiffy. Light the lamp, Polly, dear, and let's have things cheerful just as glad to see you, Washington, as if you'd been lost a century and we'd found you again!"

By this time the Colonel was conveying a lighted match into a poor little stove. Then he propped the stove door to its place by leaning the poker against it, for the hinges had retired from business. This door framed a small square of isinglass, which now warmed up with a faint glow.

Mrs. Sellers lit a cheap, showy lamp, which dissipated a good deal of the gloom, and then everybody gathered into the light and took the stove into close companionship.

The children climbed all over Sellers, fondled him, petted him, and were lavishly petted in return. Out from this tugging, laughing, chattering disguise of legs and arms and little faces, the Colonel's voice worked its way and his tireless tongue ran blithely on without interruption;and the purring little wife, diligent with her knitting, sat near at hand and looked happy and proud and grateful; and she listened as one who listens to oracles and, gospels and whose grateful soul is being refreshed with the bread of life. Bye and bye the children quieted down to listen; clustered about their father, and resting their elbows on his legs, they hung upon his words as if he were uttering the music of the spheres.

A dreary old hair-cloth sofa against the wall; a few damaged chairs; the small table the lamp stood on; the crippled stove--these things constituted the furniture of the room. There was no carpet on the floor;on the wall were occasional square-shaped interruptions of the general tint of the plaster which betrayed that there used to be pictures in the house--but there were none now. There were no mantel ornaments, unless one might bring himself to regard as an ornament a clock which never came within fifteen strokes of striking the right time, and whose hands always hitched together at twenty-two minutes past anything and traveled in company the rest of the way home.

"Remarkable clock!" said Sellers, and got up and wound it. "I've been offered--well, I wouldn't expect you to believe what I've been offered for that clock. Old Gov. Hager never sees me but he says, 'Come, now, Colonel, name your price--I must have that clock!' But my goodness I'd as soon think of selling my wife. As I was saying to---- silence in the court, now, she's begun to strike! You can't talk against her--you have to just be patient and hold up till she's said her say. Ah well, as I was saying, when--she's beginning again! Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twen---- ah, that's all.--Yes, as I was saying to old Judge---- go it, old girl, don't mind me.--Now how is that? ----isn't that a good, spirited tone? She can wake the dead! Sleep? Why you might as well try to sleep in a thunder-factory. Now just listen at that. She'll strike a hundred and fifty, now, without stopping,--you'll see. There ain't another clock like that in Christendom."

Washington hoped that this might be true, for the din was distracting--though the family, one and all, seemed filled with joy; and the more the clock "buckled down to her work" as the Colonel expressed it, and the more insupportable the clatter became, the more enchanted they all appeared to be. When there was silence, Mrs Sellers lifted upon Washington a face that beamed with a childlike pride, and said:

"It belonged to his grandmother."

The look and the tone were a plain call for admiring surprise, and therefore Washington said (it was the only thing that offered itself at the moment:)

"Indeed!"