Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/393

Rh might be, clenched, upon the porch rail, beneath his deeply wrinkled forehead, were not unlike the famous praying hands of Albert Dürer; they had a little of the delicacy and much of the pathos of that touching picture of which it has been said, "It lifts the cry of the ages from humanity to Heaven."

If Jonathan Perch had been told, thirty years before, that he should become at sixty-eight a pensioner upon his native town, he would have resented the impertinent prophecy as hotly as would any comfortable young man who may read this episode in the history of a lonely and neglected age.

By what subtle stages old Jonathan had fallen upon the fate of a man who has not succeeded, nobody knew; perhaps he himself least of all. America plays whimsical games of chance with the surest and the safest of us, and the loaded dice drop easily against the unbefriended and the weak; most easily against the sick and the sensitive. However it happened, Jonathan Perch was a beaten soldier in the battle of industrial life. He could hardly remember when last he earned a hundred dollars a year.

His shabby cottage had long ago been sold for taxes over his head. It had been bought in by a chance divinity—a summer lady of kindly and unorganized impulses, who had left the village after one season, without evicting him, without collecting rent, without even a personal interview with her puzzled beneficiary. Jonathan had stayed on in his old home because he had been given to understand that his benefactress (of whom he knew nothing except that, by a pretty accident, she bore the name of Mersey) expected him to do so "for the present." This phrase, which flagellates the anxious temperament even in a tolerable situation, tormented Jonathan at first. But now he had ceased to forecast, as he had ceased to fear. For the past two years he had existed like a shell-fish, under the old roof to which his organism had conformed. He planted corn and vegetables behind his house, and picked apples in front of it. He had a few hens and lived a good deal on eggs. The neighbors gave him milk. The overseer of the town poor, with a certain consideration for his faded gentility, such as occasionally illuminates the hard-headed public guardians in our kindly New England villages, had refrained from forcing him into the almshouse. He cut down an oak-tree now and then, or a pine—it took him a good while,—and contrived to keep from freezing. The town saw to it that he did not starve. But Jonathan had ceased to be a wage-earner. It was a good while since he had handled money. People, according to their individual tastes, gave him almost anything else—a pig, or cold potatoes, a bantam chicken, cream-of-tartar biscuits, or grape jelly, darned flannels, or mince pie, cheap tea, or rubbers that leaked. One inspired lady presented him with a crêpe tissue-paper lamp-shade, and three had sent him Bibles.

Five years ago an imaginative woman who had eight children, four cats, and six dogs had contributed, as her share of the public responsibility in Jonathan's behalf, a puppy.

This donation had become in the life of the desolate old man an epoch beside which everything else that he often thought about retreated into an episode. His youth, his friendships, his marriage, and his release from it by the unexpected death of his wife in middle life; the summer when his daily paper had to stop; the year when he sold his little library; the winter when he had pneumonia; the year when his house was sold over his head—all retreated into mistiness before the date when David became his dog.

David had been a fall puppy, and that threw him for the first winter of his life closely into the society of his master, who cherished the kissing, clawing creature with the devotion of a solitary man.

Jonathan shared his fire, his food, his bed, his mind, his heart, his past, his future, with the puppy; guarded him anxiously from every snow-storm, covered the shivering little body with his own ragged comforter a dozen times a night, brooded over him like a mother through distemper and teething, and patiently educated the growing dog with the passion and the opportunity of love and leisure.

"Why, you're nothing but a baby—you!" he used to say. Beyond the lot of most of his race, David had been distinguished by the friendship of man. For five years he had been the comrade of a