“Yes, sir.  Didn’t you know?  I supposed everybody knew that.  He married Aunt Polly’s sister, and she was my mother.”

“Oh, I understand.  But, you see, I haven’t been here many years, so I don’t know all the family histories.”

“Yes, sir—­I mean, no, sir,” smiled Pollyanna.

There was a long pause.  The minister, still sitting at the foot of the tree, appeared to have forgotten Pollyanna’s presence.  He had pulled some papers from his pocket and unfolded them; but he was not looking at them.  He was gazing, instead, at a leaf on the ground a little distance away—­and it was not even a pretty leaf.  It was brown and dead.  Pollyanna, looking at him, felt vaguely sorry for him.

“It—­it’s a nice day,” she began hopefully.

For a moment there was no answer; then the minister looked up with a start.

“What?  Oh!—­yes, it is a very nice day.”

“And ’tisn’t cold at all, either, even if ’tis October,” observed Pollyanna, still more hopefully.  “Mr. Pendleton had a fire, but he said he didn’t need it.  It was just to look at.  I like to look at fires, don’t you?”

There was no reply this time, though Pollyanna waited patiently, before she tried again—­by a new route.

“Do You like being a minister?”

The Rev. Paul Ford looked up now, very quickly.

“Do I like—­Why, what an odd question!  Why do you ask that, my dear?”

“Nothing—­only the way you looked.  It made me think of my father.  He used to look like that—­sometimes.”

“Did he?” The minister’s voice was polite, but his eyes had gone back to the dried leaf on the ground.

“Yes, and I used to ask him just as I did you if he was glad he was a minister.”

The man under the tree smiled a little sadly.

“Well—­what did he say?”

“Oh, he always said he was, of course, but ’most always he said, too, that he wouldn’t stay a minister a minute if ’twasn’t for the rejoicing texts.”

“The—­what?” The Rev. Paul Ford’s eyes left the leaf and gazed wonderingly into Pollyanna’s merry little face.

“Well, that’s what father used to call ’em,” she laughed.  “Of course the Bible didn’t name ’em that.  But it’s all those that begin ‘Be glad in the Lord,’ or ‘Rejoice greatly,’ or ’Shout for joy,’ and all that, you know—­such a lot of ’em.  Once, when father felt specially bad, he counted ’em.  There were eight hundred of ’em.”

“Eight hundred!”

“Yes—­that told you to rejoice and be glad, you know; that’s why father named ’em the ‘rejoicing texts.’ "

“Oh!” There was an odd look on the minister’s face.  His eyes had fallen to the words on the top paper in his hands—­“But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” “And so your father—­liked those ‘rejoicing texts,’ " he murmured.