It was a great day, and the babe, who was on her very best six-months-old behavior, listened with admirable placidity to the "sermon of grace," on which at a future time she might, perhaps, found a genealogy. Her only offence against perfect church decorum was a sometimes rather explosive "Agoo!" as she tried to reach the ever-swaying black feather fan that was waved by her parents in turn for her benefit. Before the service was over, indeed, she had secured and torn the proud emblem into bits; but Tamar only smiled at its demolition by the baby fingers. It was a good omen, she said, and meant that the day of mourning was over.
When the doctor drove by the Gregg farm about dusk, and saw old Deacon Gregg perched cross-legged upon his own gatepost, he knew that something was wrong within, and he could not resist the temptation to drive up and speak to the old man.
It was common talk in the neighborhood that when Grandmother Gregg made things too warm for him in-doors, the good man, her spouse, was wont to stroll out to the front gate and to take this exalted seat.
Indeed, it was said by a certain Mrs. Frequent, a neighbor of prying proclivities and ungentle speech, that the deacon's wife sent him there as a punishment for misdemeanors. Furthermore, this same Mrs. Frequent did even go so far as to watch for the deacon, and when she would see him laboriously rise and resignedly poise himself upon the narrow area, she would remark:
"Well, I see Grandma Gregg has got the old man punished again. Wonder what he's been up to now?"
Her constant repetition of the unkind charge finally gained for it such credence that the diminutive figure upon the gate-post became an object of mingled sympathy and mirth in the popular regard.
The old doctor was the friend of a lifetime, and he was sincerely attached to the deacon, and when he turned his horse's head towards the gate this evening, he felt his heart go out in sympathy to the old man in durance vile upon his lonely perch.
But he had barely started to the gate when he heard a voice which he recognized as the deacon's, whereupon he would have hurried away had not his horse committed him to his first impulse by unequivocally facing the gate.