as generally "the judge" who was
too tired, being absorbed in his court duties, etc., etc. But it always
came with a laugh, and it was always genuine, for to wait upon him and
look after him and minister to him was her highest happiness.

Good for nothing as he would have been to some women--unpractical,
lazy--a man few sensible wives would have put up with--Peggy adored
him; and so did his children adore him, and so, for that matter, did his
neighbors, many of whom, although they ridiculed him behind his back,
could never escape the charm of his personality whenever they sat beside
his rocking-chair.

This chair--the only comfortable chair in the house, by the way--had, in
his less distinguished days, been his throne. In it he would sit all day
long, cutting and whittling, filing and polishing curious trinkets of
tortoise-shell for watch-guards and tiny baskets made of cherry-stones,
cunningly wrought and finished. He was an expert, too, in corn-cob
pipes, which he carved for all his friends; and pin-wheels for
everybody's children. When it came, however, to such matters as a
missing hinge to the front door, a brick under a tottering chimney, the
straightening of a falling fence, the repairing of a loose lock on the
smoke-house--or even the care of the family carryall, which despite its
great age and infirmities was often left out in the rain to rust and
ruin--these things must, of course, wait until the overworked father of
the house found time to look after them.

The children loved him the most. They asked for nothing better than to
fix him in his big chair by the fender, throw upon the fire a basket of
bark chips from the wood-yard, and enough pitch-pine knots to wake them
up, and after filling his pipe and lighting it, snuggle close--every
bend and curve of the wide-armed splint-bottomed comfort packed full,
all waiting to hear him tell one of his stories. Sometimes it was
the tale of the fish and the cuff-button--how he once dropped his
sleeve-link overboard, and how a year afterward he was in a shallop on
the Broadwater fishing for rockflsh when he caught a splendid fellow,
which when Aunt Patience cleaned--(here his voice would drop to a
whisper)--"What do you think!--why out popped the sleeve-link that was
in his cuff this minute!" And for the hundredth time the bit of
gold would be examined by each child in turn. Or it was the witch
story--about the Yahoo wild man with great horns and a lashing tail, who
l