“I’ve done my part frying the trout,” protested Jem, who hated saying grace.  “Let Walter say it.  He likes saying grace.  And cut it short, too, Walt.  I’m starving.”

But Walter said no grace, short or long, just then.  An interruption occurred.

“Who’s coming down from the manse hill?” said Di.

CHAPTER IV.  THE MANSE CHILDREN

Aunt Martha might be, and was, a very poor housekeeper; the Rev. John Knox Meredith might be, and was, a very absent-minded, indulgent man.  But it could not be denied that there was something very homelike and lovable about the Glen St. Mary manse in spite of its untidiness.  Even the critical housewives of the Glen felt it, and were unconsciously mellowed in judgment because of it.  Perhaps its charm was in part due to accidental circumstances—­the luxuriant vines clustering over its gray, clap-boarded walls, the friendly acacias and balm-of-gileads that crowded about it with the freedom of old acquaintance, and the beautiful views of harbour and sand-dunes from its front windows.  But these things had been there in the reign of Mr. Meredith’s predecessor, when the manse had been the primmest, neatest, and dreariest house in the Glen.  So much of the credit must be given to the personality of its new inmates.  There was an atmosphere of laughter and comradeship about it; the doors were always open; and inner and outer worlds joined hands.  Love was the only law in Glen St. Mary manse.

The people of his congregation said that Mr. Meredith spoiled his children.  Very likely he did.  It is certain that he could not bear to scold them.  “They have no mother,” he used to say to himself, with a sigh, when some unusually glaring peccadillo forced itself upon his notice.  But he did not know the half of their goings-on.  He belonged to the sect of dreamers.  The windows of his study looked out on the graveyard but, as he paced up and down the room, reflecting deeply on the immortality of the soul, he was quite unaware that Jerry and Carl were playing leap-frog hilariously over the flat stones in that abode of dead Methodists.  Mr. Meredith had occasional acute realizations that his children were not so well looked after, physically or morally, as they had been before his wife died, and he had always a dim sub-consciousness that house and meals were very different under Aunt Martha’s management from what they had been under Cecilia’s.  For the rest, he lived in a world of books and abstractions; and, therefore, although his clothes were seldom brushed, and although the Glen housewives concluded, from the ivory-like pallor of his clear-cut features and slender hands, that he never got enough to eat, he was not an unhappy man.

If ever a graveyard could be called a cheerful place, the old Methodist graveyard at Glen St. Mary might be so called.  The new graveyard, at the other side of the Methodist church, was a neat and proper and doleful spot; but the old one had been left so long to Nature’s kindly and gracious ministries that it had become very pleasant.