“There,” cried the girl, “what did I tell you! And isn’t it enough to make one feel ancient, the way he rolls out the syllables? Never you mind about me, grandfather. Tell the girls when they were born. I’m sure they’ve forgotten.”
They admitted the fact promptly, but he had not yet exhausted the subject of his own exceptional fortune in withstanding the ravages of age. It was a theme of which he was never weary, largely no doubt from a certain vanity, which time had spared to him in a somewhat unusual measure, along with his physical powers. To have a fresh and interested audience was inspiration enough.
“It’s a great blessing to retain one’s faculties in old age,” he said impressively. “Now I enjoy life, for aught I know, pretty near as much as I ever did; but it ain’t so with everybody. There was Barzillai, for instance. He was a younger man, by eight years, than I am, but he must have been terrible hard of hearing, by his own account, and he’d lost his taste so that there warn’t any flavor to him in the victuals he ate; though he seems to have been an active enough man in some ways,” he added reflectively.
There was a moment’s pause during which Deacon Saxon doubtless mused upon his own mercies, and his granddaughters pondered the question, who the unfortunate octogenarian whom he had just mentioned might be. Esther could not remember ever hearing of any relative of that name, and it hardly seemed to have a local flavor. She was glad when Kate, who seldom remained ignorant for want of asking a question, inquired briskly:—
“Who was this Bar—what’s his name, that you’re talking about?”
“Who was Barzillai?” cried the old man, turning upon the girl an astonished countenance. “Hain’t you never heard of Barzillai, the Gileadite, the man who went down to give sustenance to David when he was fleeing before Absalom? Don’t you know about that, and how David afterwards wanted to take him up to Jerusalem with him, but Barzillai said he was too old, and asked the king to let him stay in his own place? Hain’t you read about him? Well, I never!”
He paused as in speechless wonder, then ejaculated: “When your mother was your age she could have told all about him and anybody else you could mention out of the Bible. What on airth is she doing that she hain’t trained you up to know about it? I hope she hain’t stopped reading the scriptures herself, living out there in the West.”
“Oh, dear!” cried Kate, quite overwhelmed by this burst, and in her jealousy for her mother indifferent for the moment to the insinuation against her native section. “Mother knows more about the Bible than anybody I ever saw,—except you,—and I’ve no doubt she told us all about that man when we were little” (she made no attempt now at his name), “but I never could remember those Old Testament folks.”
It is doubtful whether Ruel Saxon felt much reassured as to the training his daughter had given her children by the cheerful manner in which Kate made the last admission. For himself his delight in those “Old Testament folks” was perennial. He had pored over their histories till every incident of their lives was as familiar to him as that of his own neighbors. He had entered so intimately into the thoughts and experiences of those ancient worthies that it was no meaningless phrase when, in his daily prayers, he asked that he might “sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of Heaven.”
Ruel Saxon was a type of that class of men, passing away now even from the hills of New England, who from infancy were so steeped in knowledge of the Bible that its incidents formed the very background of their daily thinking, and its language colored their common conversation. It must be confessed that in the Old Testament he found his keenest pleasure, but between the covers of the Old or New there was no spot which was not to him revered and familiar ground. That all scripture was given by inspiration of God, and was “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, and for instruction in righteousness,” was a part of his creed on which no shadow of doubt had ever fallen. The doctrine, according to his lights, he maintained with unction; the instruction he counted himself well qualified to give; and the reproof he felt equally called to administer on all needful occasions.