“Oh, yes; I have not forgotten my letters. For modern facts I read the papers, and for the other side of life I take poetry. But the modern novel is too severe a punishment. It is neither poetry nor wisdom.”
Until the two other men came down from the library she had no idea of the lateness of the hour. Mr. Fettiplace laid a hand on the young man’s shoulder and, with a roseate smile, explained the situation.
“This fellow is from the country, Miss Molly, and you must excuse him for expecting, when invited out to dinner, that he is to remain to breakfast.”
A moment or two later, as the three men were standing before the fire, she was astonished by a bit of unexpected wisdom. He was regarding with apparent interest a little etching that hung near the mantel, when Mr. Cabot explained that it was a very old one he had purchased in Germany, and represented the battle of Hennersdorf. Mr. Judd thought it must be the battle of Mollwitz, and gave as reasons for his belief the position of the Prussians in relation to a certain hill and the retreat of the Austrian cavalry at that stage of the fight. Mr. Cabot, obviously surprised at these details, replied, jokingly, that he was not in a position to contradict a soldier who was present at the battle.
This afforded great amusement to the rubicund guest, who exclaimed:
“You might as well back right down, Jim! Amos is simply a walking cyclopædia of military facts; and not a condensed one either! He can give you more reliable details of that battle than Frederick himself, and of every other battle that has ever been fought, from Rameses to U. S. Grant. He remembers everything; why the victors were victorious and how the defeated might have won. I believe he sleeps and eats with the great conquerors. You ought to see his library. It is a gallery of slaughter, containing nothing but records of carnage—and poetry. Nothing interests him like blood and verses. Just think,” he continued, turning to Molly, “just think of wasting your life in the nineteenth century when you feel that you possess a magnificent genius for wholesale murder that can never have a show!”
There was more bantering, especially between the older men, a promise to visit Daleford, and the two guests departed.
IV
IN April the Cabots took their trip to Daleford and found it even more inviting than Mr. Fettiplace had promised. The spacious house among the elms, with its quaint old flower-garden, the air, the hills, the restful beauty of the country, were temptations not to be resisted, and within another month they were comfortably adjusted and felt at home.
The house, which had formerly belonged to Mr. Morton Judd, stood several hundred feet from the road at the end of an avenue of wide-spreading maples. This avenue was the continuation of another and a similar avenue extending to the house of Josiah Judd, directly opposite, and the same distance from the highway. As you stood at either end it was an unbroken arch from one residence to the other. When Mr. Morton Judd was married, some fifty years ago, his father had erected this abode for him, but the young man soon after went to India, where as a merchant and a financier he achieved success, and where both he and his wife now lay at rest. Although covering as much ground, the house was less imposing than the more venerable mansion at the other end of the avenue.