n the
easy-chair, stretching his thin old hands toward the blaze, the delicacy
of his profile was charming, and that senile parting of the lips with
which he listened reminded Ewbert of his own father's looks in his last
years; so that it was with an affectionate eagerness he set about making
Hilbrook feel his presence acceptable, when Mrs. Ewbert left them to
finish up the work she had promised herself not to leave for the maid.
It was much that Hilbrook had come at all, and he ought to be made to
realize that Ewbert appreciated his coming. But Hilbrook seemed
indifferent to his efforts, or rather, insensible to them, in the
several topics that Ewbert advanced; and there began to be pauses, in
which the minister racked his brain for some new thing to say, or found
himself saying something he cared nothing for in a voice of hollow
resolution, or falling into commonplaces which he tried to give vitality
by strenuousness of expression. He heard his wife moving about in the
kitchen and dining room, with a clicking of spoons and knives and a
faint clash of china, as she put the supper things away, and he wished
that she would come in and help him with old Hilbrook; but he could not
very well call her, and she kept at her work, with no apparent purpose
of leaving it.

Hilbrook was a farmer, so far as he was anything industrially, and
Ewbert tried him with questions of crops, soils, and fertilizers; but he
tried him in vain. The old man said he had never cared much for those
things, and now it was too late for him to begin. He generally sold his
grass standing, and his apples on the trees; and he had no animals about
the place except his chickens,--they took care of themselves. Ewbert
urged, for the sake of conversation, even of a disputative character,
that poultry were liable to disease, if they were not looked after; but
Hilbrook said, Not if there were not too many of them, and so made an
end of that subject. Ewbert desperately suggested that he must find them
company,--they seemed sociable creatures; and then, in his utter dearth,
he asked how the old dog was getting on.

"Oh, he's dead," said Hilbrook, and the minister's heart smote him with
a pity for the survivor's forlornness which the old man's apathetic tone
had scarcely invited. He inquired how and when the old dog had died, and
said how much Hilbrook must miss him.

"Well, I don't know," Hilbrook returned. "He wa'n't much comfort, and
he's out of his misery, a