evidently husband and wife—she, small and straight and prim, in a high
crowned cap with a wide frill shading her face—he, large and tall, with
a black stock, which nearly touched his ears, and his forefingers joined
together and pointing in a straight line at the right knee, which was
elevated above the left. “A kind of abandoned position,” Uncle Zach was
accustomed to say to his guests when calling their attention to this
portrait of his wife’s great-grandfather, who assisted at the Tea Party,
and gave, it was said, the most blood-curdling whoop which was heard on
that memorable night. A blue cross on the figure of a man on the deck of
the Dartmouth indicated which Zacheus had decided was his wife’s
ancestor.
He was very proud of the pictures. “Wouldn’t take fifty dollars for em.
No, sir,—and I don’t believe I’d take a hundred. Offer it, and see,” he
frequently said. But no one had offered it, and they still hung in their
respective places in the best room of the hotel except when, as was the
case this morning, they were brought out and placed at a safe distance
from the scene of confusion around them.
There were brooms and mops and scrubbing brushes and pails and the smell
of soap suds in the vicinity of the wing at the west end of the hotel,
where the fiercest battle was raging. Four women, with their sleeves
rolled up and towels on their heads, were making a terrible onslaught on
something, no one could tell what, for there was neither dust nor dirt
to be seen.
“But, Lord land, it’s Dot’s way to scrub, and you can no more stop her
than you can the wind. She’s great on cleaning house, Dot is, and you
can’t control wimmen, so I let ’em slide,” Uncle Zach said to a young
man whom, after his examination of the thermometer, he found on the
north piazza, fanning himself with a newspaper and occasionally sipping
lemonade through a straw and trying to get interested in Browning’s
Sordello. After reading a page or two and failing to catch the meaning,
he closed the book and welcomed Uncle Zach with a smile as he sank
panting into a rocking chair much too large for him, for he was as small
of stature as the Zacheus for whom he was named, and whose clothes he
might have worn had they been handed down to so late a date as the 19th
century. “This I call comfortable, and somethin’ like it. How be you
feelin’ to-day? You don’t look quite as pimpin as you did two weeks ago,
when you come here,” he said to the young man, who replied that he
didn’t feel pimpin at all,—that the air was doing him good, and in a
short time he hoped to be as well as ever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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