It was uncomplainingly registered among the few facts very distinctly legible in Master Gammon’s memory, that for three entire weeks he had no dumplings for dinner at the farm; and although, upon a computation, articles of that description, amounting probably to sixty-three (if there is any need for our being precise), were due to him, and would necessarily be for evermore due to him, seeing that it is beyond all human and even spiritual agency to make good unto man the dinner he has lost, Master Gammon uttered no word to show that he was sensible of a slight, which was the only indication given by him of his knowledge of a calamity having changed the order of things at the farm.  On the day when dumplings reappeared, he remarked, with a glance at the ceiling:  “Goin’ on better—­eh, marm?”

“Oh!  Mas’ Gammon,” Mrs. Sumfit burst out; “if I was only certain you said your prayers faithful every night!” The observation was apparently taken by Master Gammon to express one of the mere emotions within her bosom, for he did not reply to it.

She watched him feeding in his steady way, with the patient bent back, and slowly chopping old grey jaws, and struck by a pathos in the sight, exclaimed,—­

“We’ve all been searched so, Mas’ Gammon!  I feel I know everything that’s in me.  I’d say, I couldn’t ha’ given you dumplin’s and tears; but think of our wickedness, when I confess to you I did feel spiteful at you to think that you were wiltin’ to eat the dumplin’s while all of us mourned and rocked as in a quake, expecting the worst to befall; and that made me refuse them to you.  It was cruel of me, and well may you shake your head.  If I was only sure you said your prayers!”

The meaning in her aroused heart was, that if she could be sure Master Gammon said his prayers, so as to be searched all through by them, as she was herself, and to feel thereby, as she did, that he knew everything that was within him, she would then, in admiration of his profound equanimity, acknowledge him to be a superior Christian.

Naturally enough, Master Gammon allowed the interjection to pass, regarding it as simply a vagrant action of the engine of speech; while Mrs. Sumfit, with an interjector’s consciousness of prodigious things implied which were not in any degree comprehended, left his presence in kindness, and with a shade less of the sense that he was a superior Christian.

Nevertheless, the sight of Master Gammon was like a comforting medicine to all who were in the house.  He was Mrs. Sumfit’s clock; he was balm and blessedness in Rhoda’s eyes; Anthony was jealous of him; the farmer held to him as to a stake in the ground:  even Robert, who rallied and tormented, and was vexed by him, admitted that he stood some way between an example and a warning, and was a study.  The grand primaeval quality of unchangeableness, as exhibited by this old man, affected them singularly in their recovery from the storm and the wreck of the