"Want to see all kinds, I s'pose," she said, slyly. "Guess I'll try it myself, another Sunday!"
"Anybody to home?" came a very high and wheezy voice from the doorway. Dorcas knew that also, and so did Nance Pete.
"It's that old haddock't lives up on the mountain," said the latter, composedly, searching in her pocket, and then pulling out a stray bit of tobacco and pressing it tenderly into her pipe.
An old man, dressed in a suit of very antique butternut clothes, stood at the sill, holding forward a bunch of pennyroyal. He was weazened and dry; his cheeks were parchment color, and he bore the look of an active yet extreme old age. He was totally deaf. Dorcas advanced toward him, taking a bright five-cent piece from her pocket. She held it out to him, and he, in turn, extended the pennyroyal; but before taking it, she went through a solemn pantomime. She made a feint of accepting the herb, and then pointed to him and to the road.
"Yes, yes!" said the old man, irritably. "Bless ye! of course I'm goin' to meetin'. I'll set by myself, though! Yes, I will! Las' Sunday, I set with Jont Marshall, an' every time I sung a note, he dug into me with his elbow, till I thought I should ha' fell out the pew-door. My voice is jest as good as ever 'twas, an' sixty-five year ago come spring, I begun to set in the seats."
The coin and pennyroyal changed ownership, and he tottered away, chattering to himself in his senile fashion.
"Look here, you!" he shouted back, his hand on the gate. "Heerd anything o' that new doctor round here? Well, he's been a-pokin' into my ears, an' I guess he'd ha' cured me, if anybody could. You know I don't hear so well's I used to. He went a-peekin' an' a-pryin' round my ears, as if he'd found a hornet's nest. I dunno what he see there; I know he shook his head. I guess we shouldn't ha' got no such a man to settle down here if he wa'n't so asthmy he couldn't git along where he was. That's the reason he come, they say. He's a bright one!"
Dorcas left her sweeping, and ran out after him. For the moment, she forgot his hopeless durance in fleshly walls.
"Did he look at 'em?" she cried. "Did he? Tell me what he said!"
"Why, of course I don't hear no better yit!" answered old Simeon, testily, turning to stump away, "but that ain't no sign I sha'n't! He's a beauty! I set up now, when he goes by, so's I can hear him when he rides back. I put a quilt down in the fore-yard, an' when the ground trimbles a mite, I git up to see if it's his hoss. Once I laid there till 'leven. He's a beauty, he is!"