"How are you, Mr. Handy?" father inquired, coming in.
"I should be well, if my grinders didn't trouble me; they play the mischief o'nights. Have you heard from the Adamant, Mr. Morgeson? I should like to get my poor boy's chist. The Lord ha' mercy on him, whose bones are in the caverns of the deep."
"Now, Abram, do shut up. Tea is ready, Mr. Morgeson. I'll bring in the ham directly," said Temperance.
There was no news from the Adamant. I lingered in the hope of discovering why Mr. Handy irritated Temperance. He was a man of sixty, with a round head, and a large, tender wart on one cheek; the two tusks under his upper lip suggested a walrus. Though he was no beauty, he looked thoroughly respectable, in garments whose primal colors had disappeared, and blue woolen stockings gartered to a miracle of tightness.
"Temperance," he said, "my quinces have done fust rate this year. I haint pulled 'em yet; but I've counted them over and over agin. But my pig wont weigh nothin' like what I calkerlated on. Sarved me right. I needn't have bought him out of a drove; if Charity had been alive, I shouldn't ha' done it. A man can't—I say, Tempy—a man can't git along while here below, without a woman."
She gave my arm a severe pinch as she passed with the ham, and I thought it best to follow her. Mother looked at her with a smile, and said: "Deal gently with Brother Abram, Temperance."
"Brother be fiddlesticked!" she said tartly. "Miss Morgeson, do you want some quinces?"
"Certainly."
"We'll make hard marmalade this year, then. You shall have the quinces to-morrow." And she retired with a softened face. I was told that Abram Handy was a widower anxious to take Temperance for a second helpmeet, and that she could not decide whether to accept or refuse him. She had confessed to mother that she was on the fence, and didn't know which way to jump. He was a poor, witless thing, she knew; but he was as good a man as ever breathed, and stood as good a chance of being saved as the wisest church-member that ever lived! Mother thought her inclined to be mistress of an establishment over which she might have sole control. Abram owned a house, a garden, and kept pigs, hens, and a cow; these were his themes of conversation. Mother could not help thinking he was influenced by Temperance's fortune. She was worth two thousand dollars, at least. The care of her wood-lot, the cutting, selling, or burning the wood on it, would be a supreme happiness to Abram, who loved property next to the kingdom of heaven. The tragedy of the old man's life was the loss of his only son, who had been killed by a whale a year since. The Adamant, the ship he sailed in, had not returned, and it was a consoling hope with Abram that his boy's chist might come back.
"We heard of poor Charming Handy's death the tenth of September, about three months after Abram began his visits to Temperance," Veronica said.