Kate listened eagerly, but she did not sigh.  It was all charming to her in the soft spring sunshine, the air a perfume, the birds singing, the blossoms bursting, the peach-trees anthems of praise—­and best of all her dear Uncle George strolling at her side.  And then everything was so clean and fresh and sweet in every nook and corner of the tumble-down house.  Peggy, as she soon discovered, looked after that—­in fact Peggy looked after everything that required looking after—­and everything did—­including the judge.  Mr. Coston was tired, Peggy would say, or Mr. Coston had not been very well, so she just did it herself instead of bothering him.  Since his promotion it was generally “the judge” who was too tired, being absorbed in his court duties, etc., etc.  But it always came with a laugh, and it was always genuine, for to wait upon him and look after him and minister to him was her highest happiness.

Good for nothing as he would have been to some women—­unpractical, lazy—­a man few sensible wives would have put up with—­Peggy adored him; and so did his children adore him, and so, for that matter, did his neighbors, many of whom, although they ridiculed him behind his back, could never escape the charm of his personality whenever they sat beside his rocking-chair.

This chair—­the only comfortable chair in the house, by the way—­had, in his less distinguished days, been his throne.  In it he would sit all day long, cutting and whittling, filing and polishing curious trinkets of tortoise-shell for watch-guards and tiny baskets made of cherry-stones, cunningly wrought and finished.  He was an expert, too, in corn-cob pipes, which he carved for all his friends; and pin-wheels for everybody’s children.  When it came, however, to such matters as a missing hinge to the front door, a brick under a tottering chimney, the straightening of a falling fence, the repairing of a loose lock on the smoke-house—­or even the care of the family carryall, which despite its great age and infirmities was often left out in the rain to rust and ruin—­these things must, of course, wait until the overworked father of the house found time to look after them.

The children loved him the most.  They asked for nothing better than to fix him in his big chair by the fender, throw upon the fire a basket of bark chips from the wood-yard, and enough pitch-pine knots to wake them up, and after filling his pipe and lighting it, snuggle close—­every bend and curve of the wide-armed splint-bottomed comfort packed full, all waiting to hear him tell one of his stories.  Sometimes it was the tale of the fish and the cuff-button—­how he once dropped his sleeve-link overboard, and how a year afterward he was in a shallop on the Broadwater fishing for rockflsh when he caught a splendid fellow, which when Aunt Patience cleaned—­(here his voice would drop to a whisper)—­“What do you think!—­why out popped the sleeve-link that was in his cuff this minute!” And for the