"I sho' will--an', Miss Judy, I'm wonderin' if you ain't got a little
bitser blue cloth what I mought patch my pants with. If my coattails
wa'n't so long I wouldn't be fitten ter go 'mongst folks."
After some discussion with her mother, in which the girl tried to make
Mrs. Buck see the difference between saving and hoarding, Judith
finally produced for old Billy many leftovers of maternal and paternal
grandfathers.
"Mumsy, you are a trump. Now, you see you saved these things so
someone deserving could use them, but if they had stayed in the attic
until the moths had eaten them up while old Billy went ragged then
that would have been wasteful hoarding."
"I'm not minding so much about your Grandfather Buck's things, but
somehow it seems a desecration for that old darkey to be wearing your
Grandfather Knight's trousers."
"That's what makes me say you are a trump, Mumsy. I know you look upon
those broadcloth pants as a kind of sacred trust, and I just love you
to death for giving in about them."
"And my father was tall and straight of limb, too," wailed Mrs. Buck.
"It seems worse because old Billy's legs are so short and crooked."
Crooked they may have been, but short they were not. By the time the
broadcloth trousers traveled the circuitous route of the old man's
legs everything came out even.
"Fit me like they was made fer me," he exclaimed, showing himself to
Judith.
"Perhaps they were," mused Judith. "And now the coat!"
It was a rusty coat, long of tail and known at the time of its
pristine glory as a "Prince Albert." Ezra Knight had kept it for
funerals and other ceremonious occasions.
"Is there ary hat?"
There was--a high silk hat with a broad brim. Mrs. Buck rather thought
it was one that had belonged to her grandfather and not her father.
At any rate, it rested comfortably on Billy's cotton white wool.
"Now, Uncle Billy, trim your beard and nobody will know you,"
suggested Judith. So trim his beard he did, much to the improvement of
his appearance.
"Reform number one!" said Judith to herself.
Miss Ann slept the sleep of industry that first night at the Bucks',
and the sun was high when she opened her tired old eyes. She lay still
for a moment, wondering where she was. This room was different from
any of the other guest chambers she had occupied. There was a kind of
austerity in the quaint old furniture that was lacking in the bedrooms
where modern taste held sway. Nothing had been taken from or added to
the Bucks' guest chamber since Grandmother Knight had reverently
placed there her best highboy and her finest mahogany bed and candle
stand. On the mantel was the model of a ship that tradition said the
Norse sailor had carved, and on the walls steel engravings of Milton
and Newton--Milton looking up at the stars seeking the proper rhymes,
and Newton with eyes cast down searching out the power of gravity from
the ground.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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