“You look as your mother did at your age; wonderfully like,” he said, with his eyes on Esther’s face, “and you, too, but not so much,” he added more slowly, turning to Kate. He took off his spectacles and returned them to an old-fashioned steel case; then asked, with much deliberation, “And what do you think of your old grandfather?”
“Why, you look just as I thought you did, only so very much younger,” replied Esther. “I’d no idea you were so strong and active.” She paused an instant, then, with a charming eagerness in her voice, added: “You make me think of the ‘Farmer of Tilsbury Vale.’ You know the poem says,—
“‘His bright eyes look brighter, set off by the streak
Of the unfaded rose that still blooms on his cheek.’”
The old gentleman made no attempt to conceal his elation. He fairly beamed; and Stella murmured in Esther’s ear: “You’ve done it! His youthful looks are his particular vanity; and to have a fresh quotation brought to bear upon the subject!” She lifted her hands as if in despair of expressing the effect on her grandfather, and settled back in her seat. He had turned to Kate and was plainly waiting for her to speak now.
“Well,” said that young lady, regarding him with cheerful scrutiny, “I can’t quote any poetry about it. It’s always Esther who puts in the fine strokes with that sort of thing; but I must say I think you look mighty young for a man of your age.”
In its way this was equally good. Ruel Saxon evidently considered that she had used a very strong expression.
“Well,” he said with complacence, “I guess there ain’t much doubt but what I do bear my age better ’n most men at my time of life. I guess I’m some like Moses about that. You know it says, ‘his eye was not dim nor his natural force abated,’ when he got to be a very old man.”
There was such evident surprise on the part of his granddaughters at this remark that he added: “To be sure, Moses was a good deal older ’n I am; he was a hundred and twenty years old when that was said of him, and I hain’t got to that yet by considerable. But I’m past the time of life that most men get to, a good deal past. I was born in the year seventeen hundred and ninety-one, and if I live till the twenty-first day of next June I shall be eighty-nine years old.”
He paused to let the statement take full effect, and Stella remarked: “That’s the way grandfather always tells his age. He names that year, away back in the last century, and then he tells what his birthday next year will make him. I don’t mind his keeping account for himself that way, but he has the same style of reckoning for the rest of us.”
“Well,” he said, with a twinkle in his eyes, “the women would forget their own ages if it warn’t for me and the big Bible. Now Stella here was born in the year—”