The doctor put his cigar back into his mouth, clasped one knee in his hands, and fixed his eyes in meditation on a one-eared Hippocrates looking down with a dirty face from the top of a bookcase. Perhaps the doctor was thinking of the two or three hundred complimentary visits he had been permitted to make upon Uncle Capen within ten years.
Presently a smile broke over his face.
“I must tell you before I forget it,” he said, “how Uncle Capen nursed one of my patients. Years and years ago I had John Ellis, our postmaster now, down with a fever. One night Uncle Capen watched; you know he was spry and active till he was ninety. Every hour he was to give Ellis a little ice-water, and when the first time came, he took a table-spoonful—there was only a dim light in the room—and poured the ice-water down Ellis’s neck. Well, Ellis jumped as much as so sick a man could, and then lifted his finger to his lips. ‘Here’s my mouth,’ said he. ‘Why, why,’ said Uncle Capen, ‘is that your mouth? I took that for a wrinkle in your forehead.’”
The minister laughed.
“I have heard a score of such stories to-day,” he said. “There seem to be enough of them; but I can’t find anything adapted to a sermon, and yet they seem to expect a detailed biography.”
“Ah, that’s just the trouble,” said the doctor. “But let us go into the house. My wife remembers everything that ever happens, and she can post you up on Uncle Capen, if anybody can.”
So they crossed the dooryard into the house.
Mrs. Hunter was sewing; a neighbor, come to tea, was crocheting wristers for her grandson. They were both talking at once as the doctor opened the sitting-room door.
“Since neither of you appears to be listening,” he said, as they started up, “I won’t apologize for interrupting. Mr. Holt is collecting facts about Uncle Capen for his funeral sermon, and I thought that my good wife could help him out, if anybody could. So I will leave him.”
And the doctor, nodding, went into the hall for his coat and driving-gloves, and, going out, disappeared round the corner of the house.