"I expect you want y'r dinner. We live a
good piece from the store, Miss Marriott an' any time if you should get
out of ink, don't make any bones of asking for it. We've got some right
here in the house, an' you're as welcome to it as if you was my own
daughter."
I was glad to find, at dinner, that the family consisted of Mr. and Mrs.
Hopper only, with the exception of a couple of farm-hands, whose
lumbering tread down the back-stairs wakened me each morning about four.
I found Mr. Hopper a tall, bent old man, with meek, faded blue eyes, and
a snowy frill of beard. He had an especially sweet and pathetic voice,
with a little quaver in it, like a bashful girl's.
He laid down his knife and fork, and looked at me with an air of gentle
inquiry, as I took my seat at the table. "Mrs. Hopper tells me you're a
literary," he said at length. I'm afraid I replied, "Yes?" with the
rising inflection of the village belle, nothing else occurring to me to
say.
"Well," said Mr. Hopper, softly, pushing back his chair, and rising to
leave the table, "it's in our fam'ly some too. And in Ma's. One o' my
uncles and one o' her brothers." He shuffled out of the room with a
placid smile, as Mrs. Hopper said, deprecatingly, but with conscious
pride, "La, pa, Jim never wrote more'n two or three pieces."
For a few days I took a vacation.
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