Page:Cornelia Meigs--The island of Appledore.djvu/27

Rh of this chair, and we’ll be off. The clock is ticking away as steadily as old Father Time  himself, but I suppose you will find some tinkering to do.”

He took up the heavy wooden stick that leaned against his chair and that looked as  rough and knobby and weather-worn as himself. With Johann’s help he rose slowly from his seat, making Billy quite gasp at the full  sight of how big he was. Yet he would have been much bigger could he have stood upright,  for he was bent and twisted with rheumatism  in every possible way; his shoulders bowed,  his back crooked, his knees and elbows warped  quite out of their natural shape. He wrinkled his forehead under the stress of evident pain and breathed very hard as he stumped  down the path, but for a few moments he said  nothing.

“Kind of catches me a little when I first get up,” he remarked cheerfully at last. “There have been three days of fog and that’s always bad for a man as full of rheumatics as  I am. I hope you won’t mind very much gathering the berries yourself. I—I—” his face twisted with real agony as he stumbled