Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 / An Illustrated Magazine

by Various

In engaging himself to teach this art and mystery to Tony, he undertook to impart a great deal more knowledge than he himself possessed,—a thing, by the way, which is very common with a good many other people. Altogether it was a hard bargain for poor Tony; but when parents are so idle and thriftless as to expose their children to such a fate as his, they leave them a legacy of nothing better than the very hardest kind of bargains.

In addition to this help, about a year after Tony took up his quarters with Mr. Spangler, there came along an old man of seventy, a sort of distant relation of the Spanglers, who thenceforward made the farm his home. Mr. Spangler and his wife called him “Benny,” but all the younger members of the family, out of respect for his age, called him “Uncle,” so that in a very short time he went by no other name than that of “Uncle Benny,” and this not only on the farm, but all over the neighborhood.

Uncle Benny turned out to be the pleasantest old man the boys and girls had ever been acquainted with. It was no wonder they liked him, for he was very fond of children, and like generally begets like. He was a very different sort of character from any about the farm. He had been well educated, and being in his younger days of a roving, sight-hunting disposition, he had travelled all over the world, had seen a multitude of strange men and strange things, and had such a way of telling what he had thus picked up as never to fail of interesting those who heard him. Sometimes of a long winter evening, when he was giving accounts of foreign countries, or how people lived in our great cities, or how they carried on farming in other parts of our country, he talked so pleasantly that no one thought of being sleepy. On such evenings, before he came to live on the farm, Mr. Spangler would often fall asleep on his chair in the chimney corner, and once or twice actually tipped over quite into the ashes; but now, when Uncle Benny got fairly under way, there was no more going to sleep. Mr. Spangler pricked up his ears, and listened better than if any one had been reading from a book.

Then Uncle Benny had a way of always putting in some good advice to both men and boys, and even to the girls. He had read and travelled so much, that he had something appropriate for every event that turned up. Indeed, every one was surprised at his knowing so much. Besides this, he was very lively and cheerful, and as fond of fun as could be, and seemed able to make any one laugh whenever he chose to indulge in a joke.

In addition to all this, he was uncommonly handy with tools. Though an old man, and not strong enough to do a full day's work at mowing or hay-making, because of stiff joints, yet he could potter about the house and barns, with a hatchet, and saw, and a nail-box, and mend up a hundred broken places that had been neglected for years before he came to live there. If he saw anything out of order, a gate with no latch, a picket loose in the garden fence, or any other trifling defect about the premises, he went to work and made all right again. He even mended the broken lights in the kitchen windows, and got rid of all the old hats and bonnets that had been stuffed into them. He put on new buttons to keep up the sashes, and so banished the big sticks from the wood-pile that had been used to prop them up. He said they were too ugly even to look at.

It was Uncle Benny who nailed up the loose door-step which the pig had rooted away from its place, causing Lucy Spangler to fall on the edge of a bucket and break her nose. Lucy came out to thank him for doing the thing so nicely; for ever since the accident to her nose, she had been very skittish about putting her foot on the step.

“Ah, Lucy,” said Uncle Benny, “I wish I could mend your nose as easily.”

“Indeed I wish so too,” replied Lucy.

Inside of the house were numerous things that wanted looking after in the same way. There was not a bolt or a latch that would work as it ought to. All the closet locks were out of order, while one half the doors refused to shut. In fact there were twenty little provocations of this kind that were perpetual annoyances to the women. Uncle Benny went to work and removed them all; there was no odd job that he was not able to go through with. Indeed, it was the luckiest day in the history of that farm when he came to live upon it, for it did seem that, if the farm were ever to be got to rights, he was the very man to do it. Now, it was very curious, but no one told Uncle Benny to do these things. But as soon as he had anchored himself at Mr. Spangler's he saw how much the old concern was out of gear, and, providing himself with tools, he undertook, as one of his greatest pleasures, to repair these long-standing damages, not because he expected to be paid for it, but from his own natural anxiety to have things look as they ought.

The boys watched the old man's operations with great interest, for both Joe and Tony were ambitious of knowing how to handle tools. One day he took hold of the coffee-mill, which some clumsy fellow had only half nailed up in the kitchen, so that, whenever the coffee was ground, whoever turned the crank was sure to bruise his knuckles against the wall. Mrs. Spangler and her daughters of course did all the grinding, and complained bitterly of the way the mill was fixed. Besides, it had become shockingly dull, so that it only cracked the grains, and thus gave them a miserably weak decoction for breakfast. Now, Uncle Benny had been used to strong coffee, and couldn't stand what Mrs. Spangler gave him. So he unshipped the mill, took it to pieces, with a small file sharpened up the grinders, which by long use had become dull, oiled its joints, and screwed it up in a new place, where it was impossible for the knuckles to be bruised. It then worked so beautifully, that, instead of every one hating to put his hand on the crank, the difficulty was to keep the children away from it,—they would grind on it an hour at a time. Such a renovation of damaged goods had never before been seen on Spangler's premises.