"I do feel so perfectly happy," said the Old Lady,
with a long, rapturous breath.
III. Each In His Own Tongue
The honey-tinted autumn sunshine was falling thickly over
the crimson and amber maples around old Abel Blair's door.
There was only one outer door in old Abel's house, and it almost
always stood wide open. A little black dog, with one ear missing
and a lame forepaw, almost always slept on the worn red sandstone
slab which served old Abel for a doorstep; and on the still
more worn sill above it a large gray cat almost always slept.
Just inside the door, on a bandy-legged chair of elder days,
old Abel almost always sat.
He was sitting there this afternoon--a little old man,
sadly twisted with rheumatism; his head was abnormally large,
thatched with long, wiry black hair; his face was heavily lined
and swarthily sunburned; his eyes were deep-set and black,
with occasional peculiar golden flashes in them. A strange looking
man was old Abel Blair; and as strange was he as he looked.
Lower Carmody people would have told you.
Old Abel was almost always sober in these, his later years.
He was sober to-day. He liked to bask in that ripe sunlight
as well as his dog and cat did; and in such baskings he almost
always looked out of his doorway at the far, fine blue sky over
the tops of the crowding maples.
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