When Dr. Lavendar left David at the Stuffed Animal House, he didn't
feel, somehow, like going home; the Rectory would be so quiet. It
occurred to him that, as he was on the hill, he might as well look in
on Benjamin Wright.
He found the old gentleman in his beaver hat and green serge dressing-
gown, tottering up and down the weedy driveway in front of his
veranda, and repeating poetry.
"O great corrector of enormous times, Shaker of o'er rank states, thou
grand decider Of dusty and old titles, that healest with blood--Hello!
'Bout time you came to see me. I suppose you want to get some money
out of me for something?"
"Of course; I always want money out of somebody for something. There's
a leak in the vestry roof. How are you?"
"How do you suppose I am? At eighty-one, with one foot in the grave!
Ready to jump over a five-barred gate?"
"I'm seventy-two," said Dr. Lavendar, "and I played marbles
yesterday."
"Come in and have a smoke," the older man said, hobbling on to the
veranda, where four great white columns, blistered and flaked by time,
supported a roof that darkened the shuttered windows of the second
story.
He led the way indoors to the dining-room, growling that his nigger,
Simmons, was a fool. "He says he closes the shutters to keep the
flies out; makes the room as dark as a pocket, and there ain't any
flies this time of year, anyhow. He does it to stop my birds from
singing; he can't fool me! To stop my birds!" He went over to one of
the windows and pushed the shutters open with a clatter; instantly a
twitter ran from cage to cage, and the fierce melancholy of his old
face softened. "Hear that?" he said proudly.
"I ought to come oftener," Dr. Lavendar reproached himself; "he's
lonely."
And, indeed, the room with its mammoth sideboard black with age and
its solitary chair at one end of the long table, was lonely enough. On
the walls, papered a generation ago with a drab paper sprinkled over
with occasional pale gilt medallions, were some time-stained
engravings: "The Destruction of Nineveh"; "The Trial of Effie Deans";
"The Death-bed of Washington." A gloomy room at best; now, with the
shutters of one window still bowed, and the faint twitter of the
canaries, and that one chair at the head of the table, it was very
melancholy.
"Sit down!" said Benjamin Wright. Still in his moth-eaten high hat, he
shuffled about to fetch from the sideboard a fat decanter with a
silver chain and label around its neck, and two tumblers.