I bowed, and offered him a chair but he continued standing.
“I have come,” he said, “to request your services in drawing up my last will and testament—that is,” he serenely emended, “in case your vacation time is subject to such interruption.”
While I was formulating my assent he continued:
“You have no doubt, since coming into this rather communicative neighbourhood, been informed that my son owns the homestead.”
The kind, keen old eyes took on a look of what George Eliot names “an enormous patience with the way of the world.”
“Everything belongs to John and Mary. But there are one or two little old things that they don’t care about. They’re up in the lean-to. The old mirror that, as a lad, I used to see my face in over my mother’s shoulder, it’s still holding for me the picture of my mother smiling up at me. And the old ladder-back chair that she used to sit in and cuddle me; and switch, me, too—and maybe that took the most love of all. That’s all. John and Mary don’t want them. They’re only old things, like myself. It’s natural, perfectly natural. At their age I most probably felt just so.”
He paused and looked through the lattice, where the reddened vine-leaves were beginning to fall.
“The young leaf-buds pushing off the old leaves. It’s nature.”
Before sunset—for the old man was strangely impatient—I had his “will” signed, witnessed, and sealed. The old mirror and chair were to go to a wee, odd little old lady, called in the neighbourhood “Miss Tabby” Titcomb because of her forty-odd cats, except for which she lived alone.
“Little Ellen,” he called her, as he fondly spoke of their school days together. “Mother would have been well content if we’d hit it off together, Ellen and I. But a boy is as apt as not, when urged one way, to fly off in another; and I was at the skittish age.