“Matter enough,” responded old Coney, who had come hobbling into our house, and sat down with a groan. “If you had the gout in your great toe, Squire, as I have it in mine, you’d soon feel what the matter was.”
“You have been grunting over that gout for days past, Coney!”
“So I have. It won’t go in and it won’t come out; it stops there on purpose to torment me with perpetual twinges. I have been over to Timberdale Parsonage this morning, and the walk has pretty nigh done for me.”
The Squire laughed. We often did laugh at Coney’s gout: which never seemed to be very bad, or to get beyond incipient “twinges.”
“Better have stayed at home and nursed your gout than have pranced off to Timberdale.”
“But I had to go,” said the farmer. “Jacob Lewis sent for me.”
Mr. Coney spoke of Parson Lewis, Rector of Timberdale. At this time the parson was on his last legs, going fast to his rest. His mother and old Coney’s mother had been first cousins, which accounted for the intimacy between the parsonage and the farm. It was Eastertide, and we were spending it at Crabb Cot.
“Do you remember Thomas Lewis, the doctor?” asked old Coney.
“Remember him! ay, that I do,” was the Squire’s answer. “What of him?”
“He has been writing to the parson to take a house for him; he and his daughter are coming to live in old England again. Poor Lewis can’t look out for one himself, so he has put it upon me. And much I can get about, with this lame foot!”