Hettys Strange History | Page 2

had a stroke of paralysis: he lived six years after that; but he could not
walk about the farm any longer. He used to sit in a big cane-bottomed
chair close to the fireplace, in winter, and under a big lilac-bush, at the
north-east corner of the house, in summer. He kept a stout iron-tipped
cane by his side: in the winter, he used it to poke the fire with; in the
summer, to rap the hens and chickens which he used to lure round his
chair by handfuls of corn and oats. Sometimes he would tap the end of
the wooden leg with this cane, and say, laughingly, "Ha! ha! think of a
leg like that's being paralyzed, if you please. Isn't that a joke? It 's just
as paralyzed as the other: damn those British rascals." And only a few
hours before he died, he said to his son: "Look here, Abe, you put on
my grave-stone,--'Here lies Abraham Gunn, all but one leg.' What do
you suppose one-legged men're going to do in the resurrection, hey,
Abe? I'll ask the parson if he comes in this afternoon," he added. But,
when the parson came, the brave, merry eyes were shut for ever, and
the old hero had gone to a new world, on which he no doubt entered as
resolutely and cheerily as he had gone through nearly a century of this.
These glimpses of the old Squire's characteristics are not out of place
here, although he himself has no place in our story, having been dead
and buried for more than twenty years before the story begins. But he
lived again in his granddaughter Hetty. How much of her off-hand,
comic, sturdy, resolute, disinterested nature came to her by direct
inheritance from his blood, and how much was absorbed as she might
have absorbed it from any one she loved and associated with, it is
impossible to tell. But by one process or the other, or by both, Hetty
Gunn was, as all the country people round about said, "Just the old
Squire over again," and if they sometimes added, as it must be owned

they did, "It's a thousand pities she wasn't a boy," there was, in this
reflection on the Creator, no reflection on Hetty's womanliness: it was
rather on the accepted theory and sphere of woman's activities and
manifestations. Nobody in this world could have a tenderer heart than
Hetty: this also she had inherited or learned from her grandfather.
Many a day the two had spent together in nursing a sick or maimed
chicken, or a half-frozen lamb, even a woodchuck that had got its leg
broken in a trap was not an outcast to them; and as for beggars and
tramps, not one passed "Gunn's," from June till October, that was not
hailed by the old squire from under his lilac-bush, and fed by Hetty.
Plenty of sarcastic and wholesome advice the old gentleman gave them,
while they sat on the ground eating; and every word of it sank into
Hetty's wide-open ears and sensible soul, developing in her a very rare
sort of thing which, for want of a better name, we might call
common-sense sympathy. To this sturdy common-sense barrier against
the sentimental side of sympathy with other people's sufferings, Hetty
added an equally sturdy, and she would have said common-sense,
fortitude in bearing her own. This invaluable trait she owed largely to
her grandfather's wooden leg. Before she could speak plain, she had
already made his cheerful way of bearing the discomfort and
annoyance of that queer leg her own standard of patience and
equanimity. Nothing that ever happened to her, no pain, no deprivation,
seemed half so dreadful as a wooden leg. She used to stretch out her
own fat, chubby, little legs, and look from them to her grandfather's.
Then she would timidly touch the wooden tip which rested on the floor,
and look up in her grandfather's face, and say, "Poor Grandpa!"
"Pshaw! pshaw! child," he would reply, "that's nothing. It does almost
as well to walk on, and that's all legs are for. I'd have had forty legs
shot off rather than not have helped drive out those damned British
rascals."
Not even for sake of Hetty's young ears could the old Squire mention
the British rascals without his favorite expletive. Here, also, came in
another lesson which sank deep into Hetty's heart. It was for his
country that her grandfather had lost that leg, and would have gladly
lost forty, if he had had so many to lose, not for himself; for something

which he loved better than himself: this was distinct in Hetty Gunn's
comprehension before she was twelve years old, and it was a most
important force in the growth of her nature.