"She said nothing, but looked as if she could have eaten me," replied Mrs. Stone.
"Her accident must have pulled her down a bit, if she'd not something sharper than a look to fling at you," observed Ben. "You and she used to go at it like poker and tongs, but Nancy could hit hardest and longest; she'd a tongue like a mill-wheel if once you set it a-going. But put the kettle on the fire, my dear, and lets have a drop of good tea. In the evening I'll do what I've been intending to do for these many years past,—look over that box of old things belonging to my poor mother, whom I lost when I was a little chap but nine years of age. I want to sort 'em,—put by what I mean to keep, and burn what's of use to no one. Ned Franks himself would say it was right for a sick man to put his house in order."
The task of looking over the contents of that old box, which had been stowed away in a cupboard for a great length of time, was one which the carpenter had put off from day to day, and year to year, perhaps because—till illness came—he had led a busy, active life, or more probably because his cheerful, easy nature disliked any occupation that might awaken melancholy thoughts. And who but is saddened by turning over memorials of one loved and lost, even though, as in the case of Stone, forty or fifty years may have elapsed since the friend departed. This Sunday evening, as twilight came on, Ben Stone fulfilled the long-deferred task. His wife brought the old box,—a deal one covered with faded paper,—and placed it on a chair close to his bed, that he might examine its contents with ease. She lighted a candle and put it on the table beside her husband, and then sat down with some little curiosity to see her mother-in-law's hoarded treasures, but a secret conviction that the box would hold nothing but "old-fashioned rubbish."
The late Mrs. Stone had not been an orderly woman, or perhaps death had taken her by surprise, so that she had left her things in confusion,—such was the silent reflection of her son's wife, as Ben went slowly over the contents of the box. They were a strange medley. There were two gilt lockets, a nutmeg-grater, an old tooth-brush and silver thimble, a collar, an unfinished bit of embroidery, a sampler, several skeins of silk and cotton of various colors in a tangled mass together, fragments of gimp and tape, a red leather pocket-book much the worse for wear, a prayer-book without a cover, and a padlock without a key. There were also heaps of papers, recipes for cures, and recipes for dishes, old patterns, old letters, old bills, a jumble of all sorts of things which it was scarcely matter of wonder that no one had cared to reduce into order.
"You may use all these receipted bills to light the fire with, my dear," said Ben Stone; "they at least can be useful to nobody. But I'll keep this old bit of an Almanac,—1815! Well, well; how time passes! It seems strange to look back to the days when this Almanac was a new one!"
"I think that this may go into the fire too," said Mrs. Stone, who had been vainly trying to unravel a silken tangle.
"Ah! here's something curious," observed Ben, as he drew out an old letter, written on very coarse paper, in a very round, childish hand, a letter which had been fastened with a big red wafer pressed down with a button, and which was soiled with many a blot.
"Here is, I suppose, the very first letter as ever I wrote. I didn't remember that I had ever written to my mother. She died—poor, dear soul!—the week after I first went to school."
Mrs. Stone was of course interested, as any good wife would have been, in the first specimen of her husband's handwriting. She pushed the candle nearer to him, and read over his shoulder, as she might have done at the distance of half the length of the room, the school-boy's big, blotted scrawl.
"Dear Mother, I hope your well. I am ill my head is so bad pleas get me home quick QUICK your dutiful son B. S."