Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/37

Rh just back from college and hospital. One of the men cut himself with his scythe, mowing, and there was nothing left for me to do when I got there. Ah yes—I see. Well, sir, you're in luck. That's so. Yes, you'll be seeing the inside of most of the families within twenty miles, before you come to my years, but I doubt if you find the equal of the Jameses in all your goings and comings. I never have. There's a good deal goes on that's between God and James alone; but, for my part, when I find a man naked to his enemies and just outside the prison gate, I send him up there and James takes him on the farm. Or, if I have anybody sick without a spot to lay her head, I go to Mrs. James, and she brings her home to nurse. Hot nights, dark nights, stormy nights, I don't know what I'd have done in this village without that woman. Sam James could have made his fortune once merely by holding his tongue when the doubt was in his favor; but he spoke—and stayed poor. They sent him to the Legislature one term; but, by King! he was too honest for them! His word is better than another man's bond any day, and so was his father's before him. A childish sort of man, too; womanish; lives in his affections. Yes, they're rough, maybe, the Jameses; but they're rough diamonds. Never brought me much practice, though; nothing ever ails them!"

Dr. Lewis came into the living-room, set about with jars of big green boughs, where a gray-haired woman with a certain shy dignity gave him her roughened hand, where a tall gaunt man with a beaming eye took him by the shoulder and wheeled him round that he might look into his face, and where Lally laughed and cried with one arm about him and one about her father. And then, the simple blessing asked, the plates were heaped, and before they were cleared Dr. Lewis was as much one of the family as if he had been born to it.

"Wait a minute," said Father James, before they rose. "I asked the blessing of the Lord upon this food. But now I want to give thanks for life and health and a new happiness, and a son!"

It was an hour or two later that Lally and her lover went straying through the dark down by the wheat-field, where the fireflies were flashing as if all the stars were falling. "Now," said Lally, "you have come. You have seen me in my home, my people in all their difference from yours. Do you still—"

"And you have been doubting me! I knew there was some bee in your bonnet. Do you suppose I don't know what it is to value people who live so near Nature that they have all her honesty and goodness?"

"And—and the king's English?" she asked, desperately.

"Lally, I wouldn't have thought it of you," he said; but he held her fast. "You distrust me, you distrust them. Oh, you want it all cleared up? Well. Don't you know that every Scotchman speaks in his own dialect? That the Greek poets sang each in his own? That the English language is spoken in its purity only in old Mercia and in Massachusetts; and outside of that, one dialect is no worse than another? I fancy that love and truth are no less love and truth when spoken in this Doric. Lally, it makes me proud to think you born of such simple noble souls as these!"

And Lally dropped his arm, and ran up the path through the blossoming yellow lilies, pale as spirits in the dark, and grasped her mother's hand, and threw herself upon her father's breast. "Oh, he says—he says," she cried—"he says that he is proud to be your son!"