against it, for the hinges had retired from business. This door framed
a small square of isinglass, which now warmed up with a faint glow.
Mrs. Sellers lit a cheap, showy lamp, which dissipated a good deal of the
gloom, and then everybody gathered into the light and took the stove into
close companionship.
The children climbed all over Sellers, fondled him, petted him, and were
lavishly petted in return. Out from this tugging, laughing, chattering
disguise of legs and arms and little faces, the Colonel’s voice worked
its way and his tireless tongue ran blithely on without interruption;
and the purring little wife, diligent with her knitting, sat near at hand
and looked happy and proud and grateful; and she listened as one who
listens to oracles and, gospels and whose grateful soul is being
refreshed with the bread of life. Bye and bye the children quieted down
to listen; clustered about their father, and resting their elbows on his
legs, they hung upon his words as if he were uttering the music of the
spheres.
A dreary old hair-cloth sofa against the wall; a few damaged chairs; the
small table the lamp stood on; the crippled stove–these things
constituted the furniture of the room. There was no carpet on the floor;
on the wall were occasional square-shaped interruptions of the general
tint of the plaster which betrayed that there used to be pictures in the
house–but there were none now. There were no mantel ornaments, unless
one might bring himself to regard as an ornament a clock which never came
within fifteen strokes of striking the right time, and whose hands always
hitched together at twenty-two minutes past anything and traveled in
company the rest of the way home.
“Remarkable clock!” said Sellers, and got up and wound it. “I’ve been
offered–well, I wouldn’t expect you to believe what I’ve been offered
for that clock. Old Gov. Hager never sees me but he says, ‘Come, now,
Colonel, name your price–I must have that clock!’ But my goodness I’d
as soon think of selling my wife. As I was saying to—- silence in the
court, now, she’s begun to strike! You can’t talk against her–you have
to just be patient and hold up till she’s said her say. Ah well, as I
was saying, when–she’s beginning again! Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one,
twenty-two, twen—- ah, that’s all.–Yes, as I was saying to old Judge–
— go it, old girl, don’t mind me.–Now how is that? —-isn’t that a
good, spirited tone? She can wake the dead! Sleep? Why you might as
well try to sleep in a thunder-factory. Now just listen at that. She’ll
strike a hundred and fifty, now, without stopping,–you’ll see. There
ain’t another clock like that in Christendom.”
Washington hoped that this might be true, for the din was distracting–
though the family, one and all, seemed filled with joy; and the more the
clock “buckled down to her work” as the Colonel expressed it, and the
more insupportable the clatter became, the more enchanted they all
appeared to be. When there was silence, Mrs Sellers lifted upon
Washington a face that beamed with a childlike pride, and said:
“It belonged to his grandmother.”
The look and the tone were a plain call for admiring surprise, and
therefore Washington said (it was the only thing that offered itself at
the moment:)
“Indeed!”
“Yes, it did, didn’t it father!” exclaimed one of the twins. “She was my
great-grandmother–and George’s too; wasn’t she, father! You never saw
her, but Sis has seen her, when Sis was a baby-didn’t you, Sis! Sis has
seen her most a hundred times. She was awful deef–she’s dead, now.
Aint she, father!”
All the children chimed in, now, with one general Babel of information
about deceased–nobody offering to read the riot act or seeming to
discountenance the insurrection or disapprove of it in any way–but the
head twin drowned all the turmoil and held his own against the field:
“It’s our clock, now–and it’s ,got wheels inside of it, and a thing that
flatters every time she strikes–don’t it, father! Great-grandmother
died before hardly any of us was born–she was an Old-School Baptist and
had warts all over her–you ask father if she didn’t. She had an uncle