Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/315

 sport. The tide, with its beautiful impartiality, sometimes sides with the birds—too often, Uncle Bobby thought, and he would hardly have admitted that the game might be of a different opinion. Uncle Bobby was a tender-hearted man, but "yellow-leg," and plover, black duck and "old-squaws," were so clearly invented for purposes of sport that he firmly believed that they too were quite in the spirit of it.

The tide had paused, as it does when at the highest, and Uncle Bobby paused too. Again he let his oars rest on the water, while he took off his hat and wiped his brow. His forehead within the line of the hat was white as snow. "Jest like his soul," old Marm Hawkins used to say. "Uncle Bobby's soul's jest as white as a baby's, where't ain't ben roughened up by this wicked world that was allers sot agin him. Ef Uncle Bobby'd allers lived long of us, they never'd ha' ben a mark on him, an' I don' know's they's any marks on him now. When he fust come down to stay at Jenkinses, he used to hev his ups an' downs, same's the rest of us, an' he warn't allers sech good compny's the Lord meant him for. But now! Lord a massy! He's jest like an innicent child, with his kind heart and ludikerous sayins. They ain't nobody I'd ruther smoke a pipe with, than Uncle Bobby!"

And many a pipe the two cronies smoked together by the side of Marm Hawkins's air-tight stove.