Our minister sat down on the top stoop-step. It had been an awful hot day, and he looked completely tuckered out.
“Hot, ain’t it?” says I, sympathetic,—you can sympathize with folks for the weather without seeming to reproach ’em, same as sympathy for being tired out does to ’em.
“Very warm,” says he. “I’ve made,” he says, “eleven calls this afternoon.”
“Oh, did you?” I says. “What was the occasion of them?”
He looked surprised. “Pastoral calls,” he says, explaining.
“Oh,” I says. “Sick folks?”
“Why no, no,” says he. “My regular rounds. I’ve made,” he adds, “one hundred and fourteen calls this month.”
I went on pitting cherries. When I look back on it now, I know that it wasn’t natural courage at all that made me say what I did. It was merely the cherries coming on top of the ironing.
“Ain’t life odd?” says I. “When you go to see folks, it’s duty. And when I go to see folks, I do it for a nice, innocent indulgence.”
He looked kind of bewildered and sat there fanning himself with the last foreign missionary report and not saying anything for a minute.