“Jared, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!” said his wife.
“So I am, my dear,” said Jared, screwing up his face; “but it was you who grumbled. ‘Like as the arrows in the hand of a giant;’ and ‘Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them.’ That’s it, isn’t it? But they didn’t pay rent and rates and taxes in those days, and every man had his own freehold in the land of Israel. Ah! there was no Duplex Street in the land in those days.”
“Nor no Decadia,” said Mrs Jared, tartly.
“No,” said Jared, “nor no St Runwald’s. By the way, I wonder who used to mend their musical instruments at that time.”
Here Jared gave a loud nasal “whang-whung” upon the clarionet.
“There were the trumpets they blew before Jericho, you know,” he continued. “They must have got cracked some time or other. They couldn’t have had organs though, and Ichabods wern’t invented to blow. ‘To repairing clarionet, ninepence,’” he muttered, writing a little entry in a pocket-book. “Never mind the expense, my dear. Look at the breed: not such children anywhere. Talk about arrows: sharp as needles. I wish, though, you’d ask that little one of Tim’s here to play with them a little oftener. I like the child, and—and well there, I believe it’s really an act of kindness.”
“Poor little thing, yes,” said Mrs Jared; “but she’s not like a child; she’s so old and strange, and don’t seem to mix with them. Mr Ruggles came this afternoon just as Janet came up to the door.”
“Tim Ruggles—what did he want? I don’t owe him a penny.”
“Don’t talk in that way, dear, just as if all the people who came to the house wanted money.”
“Well, don’t they?” said Jared.