Uncle John was a new man. For several weeks he had been making great progress with the New Testament, printed in letters for the blind, which had come on the attorney’s order speedily. It was an immense volume, as big as a barn-door, as Uncle John facetiously wrote on his slate, and when he read it he sat at the table littered over with his interlocked rings of wood, and his figures of beast and female angels or demons, which, not yet determined.
The sun had come out for him again, at the clouded end of his life. It reached him through the points of his fingers, and warmed him to the farthest spot, and its welcome was the greater because his night had been long and its rising late.
On that afternoon memorable for Joe Newbolt, and all who gathered at the court-house to hear him, Uncle John learned 308 of the death of Isom Chase. The manner of his death was not revealed to him in the printed slips of board, and Uncle John did not ask, very likely accepting it as an event which comes to all men, and for which he, himself, had long been prepared.
After that fact had been imparted to the blind preacher, the lawyer placed under his eager fingers a slip which read:
“Did you ever witness Isom Chase’s will?”
Uncle John took his slate and wrote:
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Thirty or forty years ago,” wrote Uncle John–what was a decade more or less to him? “When he joined the Order.”
Uncle John wrote this with his face bright in the joy of being able to hold intelligent communication once more.