a leak in the vestry roof. How are you?"

"How do you suppose I am? At eighty-one, with one foot in the grave!
Ready to jump over a five-barred gate?"

"I'm seventy-two," said Dr. Lavendar, "and I played marbles
yesterday."

"Come in and have a smoke," the older man said, hobbling on to the
veranda, where four great white columns, blistered and flaked by time,
supported a roof that darkened the shuttered windows of the second
story.

He led the way indoors to the dining-room, growling that his nigger,
Simmons, was a fool. "He _says_ he closes the shutters to keep the
flies out; makes the room as dark as a pocket, and there ain't any
flies this time of year, anyhow. He does it to stop my birds from
singing; he can't fool me! To stop my birds!" He went over to one of
the windows and pushed the shutters open with a clatter; instantly a
twitter ran from cage to cage, and the fierce melancholy of his old
face softened. "Hear that?" he said proudly.

"I ought to come oftener," Dr. Lavendar reproached himself; "he's
lonely."

And, indeed, the room with its mammoth sideboard black with age and
its solitary chair at one end of the long table, was lonely enough. On
the walls, papered a generation ago with a drab paper sprinkled over
with occasional pale gilt medallions, were some time-stained
engravings: "The Destruction of Nineveh"; "The Trial of Effie Deans";