Page:Brown·Bread·from·a·Colonial·Oven-Baughan-1912.pdf/212

 worn. It was possible, of course, that the very sprightliest elegances, the nimblest and most lively creations of wit and fancy, might dwell behind these dingy exteriors and be gloomily concealed by them, like comedy behind the curtain; but, if so, the concealment was perfect—the entire library looked to promise nothing lighter than a sermon. There could never be anything in the least fantastic, or light-minded, or gay about the aspect of the old kitchen while it should retain these tenants; but, rather, an air of equable responsibility, an atmosphere of grave and even twilight, sobered and somewhat scented, too, by the company of so much unspecious brown leather; and premising, in whatever form of activity should there be pursued, a kind of passionless neutrality, a judicial stability and calm.

As for the human occupant, the father, so to speak, of this unglittering tribe, he was a gentle and tranquil old man of long past seventy, with a high, shining forehead, and a lofty dome-shaped head, white as a snow-peak in July. He had a mild, absorbed expression; he rarely spoke and even more rarely heard. Mrs. Callender had always understood that he was a doctor—Dr. Miller, her father had always called him—and, the morning after his arrival, before she knew his habits, she coaxed him into the stable to see a poor cow that was down with milk-fever. The old man accompanied her with the most perfect complaisance, gazed at the suffering creature with an air of profound consideration, and lent, or appeared to lend, the most desirable attention to Mrs. Callender’s painstaking enumeration of its symptoms. But when, at the