"I guess they might as well stay where they be." So passive was he, that many among merchants judged they had impressed him, and returned again and again to the charge; but when they found always the same imperturbable front, the same mild neutrality of demeanor, they melted sadly away, and were seen no more, leaving their places to be taken by others equally hopeful and as sure to be betrayed. One creature only was capable of rousing Nicholas Oldfield from that calm wherein he went ticking on through life. She it was who, by some natal likeness, understood him wholly; and to-night, just as he was sitting down to his supper of "cream o' tartar" biscuits and smoking tea, her clear voice broke upon his solitude. "Gran'ther," called Mary Oldfield from the door, "mother says, 'Won't you come over to supper?' She saw your smoke." Nicholas pushed back his chair a little; he felt himself completed. "You had yours?" he asked, in his usual even tones. "No, I waited for you." "Then you come right in an' git it. Take your mug--here, I'll reach it down for ye--an' there's the Good-Girl plate." Mary Oldfield was a tall, pleasant looking maid of sixteen, and standing quietly by, while her grandfather got out her own plate and mug, she was an amazingly faithful copy of him. They smiled a little at each other, in sitting down, but there was no closer greeting between them. They were exceedingly well content to be together again, and this was so simple and natural a state that there was nothing to say about it. Only Nicholas looked at her from time to time--her capable brown hands and careful braids of hair,--and nodded briefly, as he had a way of nodding at his clocks. "You know what I told you, Mary, about the Flat-Iron Lot?" he asked, while Mary buttered her biscuit. She looked at him in assent. "Well, I've proved it." "You don't say!" Mary had certain antique methods of speech, which the new-fangled school teacher, not liking to pronounce them vulgar, had tactfully dubbed "obsolete." "If we used 'em all the time they wouldn't get obsolete, would they?" asked Mary; and the school teacher, being a logical person, made no answer. So Mary went on plying them with a conscientious calmness like one determined to keep a precious and misprized metal in circulation. She even called Nicholas gran'ther, because he liked it, and because he had called his own grandfather so.