“No, I thank you,” said Mr. Holt. “If I am to invent a biography, I may as well be at it.”
Mrs. Hunter went with him to the door.
“I must just tell you,” she said, “one of Uncle Capen's sayings. It was long ago, at the time I was married and first came here. I had a young men's Bible-class in Sunday-school, and Uncle Capen came into it. He always wore a cap, and sat at meetings with the boys. So, one Sunday, we had in the lesson that verse,—you know,—that if all these things should be written, even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written; and there Uncle Capen stopped me, and said he, 'I suppose that means the world as known to the ancients?'”
Holt put on his hat, and with a smile turned and went on his way toward the parsonage; but he remembered that he had promised to call at what the local paper termed “the late residence of the deceased,” where, on the one hundredth birthday of the centenarian, according to the poet's corner,—
“Friends, neighbors, and visitors he did receive
From early in the morning till dewy eve.”
So he turned his steps in that direction. He opened the clicking latch of the gate and rattled the knocker on the front door of the little cottage; and a tall, motherly woman of the neighborhood appeared and ushered him in.
Uncle Capen's unmarried daughter, a woman of sixty, her two brothers and their wives, and half-a-dozen neighbors were sitting in the tidy kitchen, where a crackling wood-fire in the stove was suggesting a hospitable cup of tea.
The ministers appearance, breaking the formal gloom, was welcomed.
“Well,” said Miss Maria, “I suppose the sermon is all writ by this time. I think likely you 've come down to read it to us.”
“No,” said Holt, “I have left the actual writing of it till I get all my facts. I thought perhaps you might have thought of something else.”