wholly; and to-night, just as he was
sitting down to his supper of "cream o' tartar" biscuits and smoking
tea, her clear voice broke upon his solitude.

"Gran'ther," called Mary Oldfield from the door, "mother says, 'Won't
you come over to supper?' She saw your smoke."

Nicholas pushed back his chair a little; he felt himself completed.

"You had yours?" he asked, in his usual even tones.

"No. I waited for you."

"Then you come right in an' git it. Take your mug--here, I'll reach it
down for ye--an' there's the Good-Girl plate."

Mary Oldfield was a tall, pleasant looking maid of sixteen, and standing
quietly by, while her grandfather got out her own plate and mug, she was
an amazingly faithful copy of him. They smiled a little at each other,
in sitting down, but there was no closer greeting between them. They
were exceedingly well content to be together again, and this was so
simple and natural a state that there was nothing to say about it. Only
Nicholas looked at her from time to time--her capable brown hands and
careful braids of hair,--and nodded briefly, as he had a way of nodding
at his clocks.

"You know what I told you, Mary, about the Flat-Iron Lot?" he asked,
while Mary buttered her biscuit.

She looked at him in assent.

"Well, I've proved it."

"You don't say!"

Mary had certain antique methods of speech, which the new-fangled school
teacher, not liking to pronounce them vulgar, had tactfully dubbed
"obsolete." "If we used 'em all the time they wouldn't get obsolete,
would they?" asked Mary; and the school teacher, being a logical person,
made no answer. So Mary went on plying them with a conscientious
calmness like one determined to keep a precious and misprized metal in
circulation. She even called Nicholas gran'ther, because he liked it,
and because he had called his own grandfather so.

"Ye see," said Nicholas, "the fust rec'ids were missin'. 'Burnt up!'
says that town clerk over to Sudleigh. 'Burnt when the old meetin'-house
ketched fire, arter the Injun raid.' 'Burnt up!' thinks I. 'The cat's
foot! I guess so, when the communion service was carried over fifteen
mile an' left in a potato sullar.' So I says to myself, 'What become o'
that fust communion set?' Why, before the meetin'-house was repaired,
they all rode over to what's now Saltash, to worship in Square
Billin's's kitchen. Now, when Square Billin's died of a fever, that same
winter, they hove all his books into that old lumbe