in
the summer, to rap the hens and chickens which he used to lure round his
chair by handfuls of corn and oats. Sometimes he would tap the end of
the wooden leg with this cane, and say, laughingly, "Ha! ha! think of a
leg like that's being paralyzed, if you please. Isn't that a joke? It's
just as paralyzed as the other: damn those British rascals." And only a
few hours before he died, he said to his son: "Look here, Abe, you put
on my grave-stone,--'Here lies Abraham Gunn, all but one leg.' What do
you suppose one-legged men're going to do in the resurrection, hey, Abe?
I'll ask the parson if he comes in this afternoon," he added. But, when
the parson came, the brave, merry eyes were shut for ever, and the old
hero had gone to a new world, on which he no doubt entered as resolutely
and cheerily as he had gone through nearly a century of this. These
glimpses of the old Squire's characteristics are not out of place here,
although he himself has no place in our story, having been dead and
buried for more than twenty years before the story begins. But he lived
again in his granddaughter Hetty. How much of her offhand, comic,
sturdy, resolute, disinterested nature came to her by direct inheritance
from his blood, and how much was absorbed as she might have absorbed it
from any one she loved and associated with, it is impossible to tell.
But by one process or the other, or by both, Hetty Gunn was, as all the
country people round about said, "Just the old Squire over again," and
if they sometimes added, as it must be owned they did, "It's a thousand
pities she wasn't a boy," there was, in this reflection on the Creator,
no reflection on Hetty's womanliness: it was rather on the accepted
theory and sphere of woman's activities and manifestations. Nobody in
this world could have a tenderer heart than Hetty: this also she had
inherited or learned from her grandfather. Many a day the two had spent
together in nursing a sick or maimed chicken, or a half-frozen lamb,
even a woodchuck that had got its leg broken in a trap was not an
outcast to them; and as for beggars and tramps, not one passed "Gunn's,"
from June till October, that was not hailed by the old squire from under
his lilac-bush, and fed by Hetty. Plenty of sarcastic and wholesome
advice the old gentleman gave them, while they sat on the ground eating;
and every word of it sank into Hetty's wide-open ears and sensible soul,
developing in her a very rare sort of thing which,