No, it is not respectful, nor proper, nor charitable, to set down what the Reverend Smith Boyd, in that stress, ejaculated; but a beautiful, grey-haired lady, beautiful with the sweetness of content and the happiness of gratified pride and the kindliness of humour, who had paused at the Reverend Smith Boyd’s open door to inquire how soon he would be down to dinner, hastily covered her mouth with her hand, and moved away from the door, with moist blue eyes, around which twinkled a dozen tiny wrinkles born of much smiling.
When the dignified young rector came down to dinner, fully clothed and apparently in his right mind, his mother, who was the beautiful grey-haired lady with the twinkling blue eyes, looked across the table and smiled indulgently at his disguise; for he was not a grown-up, tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty-two at all. In reality he was a shock-headed, slightly freckled urchin of nine or ten, by the name of “Smitty” on the town commons, and “Tod” at home.
“Aren’t you becoming a trifle irritable of late, Tod?” she inquired with solicitude, willfully suppressing a smile which flashed up in her as she remembered that ejaculation. It was shocking in a minister, of course, but she had ever contended that ministers were, and should be, made of clay; and clay is friable.
“Yes, mother, I believe I am,” confessed the Reverend Smith Boyd, considering the matter with serious impartiality.
“You are not ill in any way?”
“Not at all,” he hastily assured her.
“Your cold is all gone?”
“Entirely. As a matter of fact, mother,” and he smiled, “I don’t think I had one.”
“If you hadn’t drank that tea, and taken the mustard foot bath, and wrapped the flannel around your throat, it might have been a severe one,” his mother complacently replied. “You haven’t been studying too much?”
“No,” and the slightest flicker of impatience twitched his brows.