“I guess not. Thet’s why I brought it myself. I kinder scented it was suthin’ special, and so I reckoned I’d save you the trouble of trudgin’ to the post-office. Deacon Hailey ain’t the man to spare himself trouble to obleege a fellow-critter. Do es you’d be done by, hey?” The deacon never lost an opportunity of pointing the moral of a position. Perhaps his sermonizing tendency was due to his habit of expounding the Sunday texts at a weekly meeting, or perhaps his weekly exposition was due to his sermonizing tendency.
“Thank you.” Mrs. Strang extended her hand for the letter. He produced it slowly, apparently from up the sleeve of his top-most coat, a wet, forlorn-looking epistle, addressed in a sprawling hand. Mrs. Strang turned it about, puzzled.
“P’raps it’s from Uncle Matt,” ejaculated Matt, appearing suddenly at the kitchen door.
“You’ve got Uncle Matt on the brain,” said Mrs. Strang. “It’s a Halifax stamp.” She could not understand it; her own family rarely wrote to her, and there was no hand of theirs in the address. Deacon Hailey lingered on, apparently prepared, in his consideration for others, to listen to the contents of his “fellow-critter’s” letter.
“Ah, sonny,” he said to Matt, “only jest turned out, and not slicked up yet. When I was your age I hed done my day’s chores afore the day hed begun. No wonder the Province is so ’tarnally behindhand, hey?”
“Thet’s so,” Matt murmured. Pop! pop! pop! was all that he heard, so that ole Hey’s moral exhortations left him neither a better nor a wiser boy.
Mrs. Strang still held the letter in her hand, apparently having become indifferent to it. Ole Hey did not know she was waiting for him to go, so that she might put on her spectacles and read it. She never wore her spectacles in public, any more than she wore her nightcap. Both seemed to her to belong to the privacies of the inner life, and glasses in particular made an old woman of one before one’s time. If she had worn out her eyes with needle-work and tears, that was not her neighbors’ business.
The deacon, with no sign of impatience, elaborately unbuttoned his outer buffalo-skin, then the overcoat beneath that, and the coat under that, and then, pulling up the edge of his cardigan that fitted tightly over his waistcoats, he toilsomely thrust his horny paw into his breeches-pocket and hauled out a fig of “black-jack.” Then he slowly produced from the other pocket a small tool-chest in the guise of a pocket-knife, and proceeded to cut the tobacco with one of the instruments.
“Come here, sonny!” he cried.
“The deacon wants you,” said Mrs. Strang.