“And are you happy?”

He wrinkled up his brows and smiled.

“What age d’ you think I am? Seventy-six!”

“You look as if you’d live to be a hundred.”

“Can’t expect it! My health’s good though, ’cept for these.

Like wind-bent boughs all the fingers of both his hands from the top joint to the tip were warped towards the thumb.

“Looks funny! But I don’t feel ’em. What you don’t feel don’t trouble you.”

“What caused it?”

“Rheumatiz! I don’t make nothin’ of it. Where there’s doctors there’s disease.”

“Then you think we make our ailments, too, as fast as we make remedies?”