to their ears.

"Will you walk in?" she asked, holding the door open.

"Thank you. Is your daughter Margaret at home now?"

"Yes, she is."

Mrs. Bowen talked like a person who had lost all her back teeth, and her
accents seemed more and more unhappy and forbidding.

"I called to see if you could let her come and help us next week," said
Mr. Royden.

"I don't know. Sit down. I'll see what she says."

Having placed a couple of worn, patched and mended wooden chairs, for
the callers, in the business room of the house, Mrs. Bowen disappeared.

Father Brighthopes looked about him with a softened, sympathizing
glance; but, before sitting down, went and shook hands with a sallow
individual, who was making shoes in one corner. He was a short, stumpy,
queer-looking man, past the middle age, with a head as bald as an egg,
and ears that stood out in bold relief behind his temples. Sitting upon
a low bench, his wooden leg--for this was Job, the soldier--stuck out
straight from his body, diverging slightly from the left knee, on which
he hammered the soles of his customers.

"Ah! how do you do?" said he, in a soft, deliberate half-whisper, as
Father Brighthopes addressed him.

With his right hand,--having carefully wiped it upon his pantaloons, or
rather pantaloon, for his luck in war enabled him to do with half a
pair,--he greeted the old clergyman modestly and respectfully, while
with his left he raised his steel-bowed glasses from his nose.

"My friend," said Father Brighthopes, "you seem industriously at work,
this morning."

"Pegging away,--pegging away!" replied Job, with a childlike smile.
"Always pegging, you know."

There was an evident attempt at so much more cheerfulness in his voice
than he really felt, that the effect was quite touching.

"That's my mother," he added, as the clergyman turned to shake hands
with a wrinkled, unconscious-looking object, who sat wrapped in an old
blanket, in a rocking-chair. "A kind old woman, but very deaf. You'll
have to speak loud."

"Good-morning, mother," cried Father Brighthopes, raising his voice, and
taking her withered hand.

The old woman seemed to start up from a sort of dream, and a feeble
gleam of intelligence crossed her seamed and bloodless features, as she
fixed her watery eye upon the clergyman.

"Oh, yes!" she cried, mumbling the shrill words between her toothless
gums, "I remember all about it. Sally's darter was born on the tenth of
June, in eighte