Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER THREE At the mature age of four, Scott Brenton’s favourite pastime had been what he termed
playing Grandpa Wheeler. The game accomplished itself by means of a chair by way of pulpit, and a serried phalanx of other chairs by way of congregation, whom the young preacher harangued by the hour together. The harangues were punctuated by occasional bursts of song, not always of a churchly nature, and emphasized by gestures which were more forceful than devout. In this game Mrs. Brenton often joined him, lending her thin soprano voice to help out his quavering childish notes, and doing her conscientious best, the while, to keep the songs attuned to the key of proper piety. To be sure, she did insist upon bringing her sewing into church and, on one occasion, she patched her young son’s trousers into a hideous pucker, by reason of her greater interest in the method of his expoundings.
Just for all the world like father! she was wont to say.
But wherever did he pick it up, when father was in his grave, three years before the child was born ?
The question was left unanswered by herself of whom she asked it. All too soon, moreover, it was joined by another question of similar import, butfar more appalling. Indeed, where did the boy, where does any boy, pick up the tricks and manners and the phraseology of certain of his forbears who quitted the world before he fairly entered it? In Scott’s case, the example was a flagrant one. At the starting of the game of
Grandpa Wheeler, Mrs. Brenton had been so charmed with the outworkings of heredity as to balk at nothing Scott might do: sermon, hymn, or even prayer. When she was sure of her role and had the leisure, she joined him in his imitative worship, delighting in the unconscious fashion in which the sonorous phras…