“I don’t need to look twice at you,” said Bartley, putting his finger on one of the heads.
“Well, that’s Bill,” said Lapham, with a gratified laugh. “He’s about as brainy as any of us, I guess. He’s one of their leading lawyers, out Dubuque way; been judge of the Common Pleas once or twice. That’s his son—just graduated at Yale—alongside of my youngest girl. Good-looking chap, ain’t he?”
“She’s a good-looking chap,” said Bartley, with prompt irreverence. He hastened to add, at the frown which gathered between Lapham’s eyes, “What a beautiful creature she is! What a lovely, refined, sensitive face! And she looks good, too.”
“She is good,” said the father, relenting.
“And, after all, that’s about the best thing in a woman,” said the potential reprobate. “If my wife wasn’t good enough to keep both of us straight, I don’t know what would become of me.”
“My other daughter,” said Lapham, indicating a girl with eyes that showed large, and a face of singular gravity. “Mis’ Lapham,” he continued, touching his wife’s effigy with his little finger. “My brother Willard and his family—farm at Kankakee. Hazard Lapham and his wife—Baptist preacher in Kansas. Jim and his three girls—milling business at Minneapolis. Ben and his family—practising medicine in Fort Wayne.”
The figures were clustered in an irregular group in front of an old farmhouse, whose original ugliness had been smartened up with a coat of Lapham’s own paint, and heightened with an incongruous piazza. The photographer had not been able to conceal the fact that they were all decent, honest-looking, sensible people, with a very fair share of beauty among the young girls; some of these were extremely pretty, in fact. He had put them into awkward and constrained attitudes, of course; and they all looked as if they had the instrument of torture which photographers call a headrest under their occiputs. Here and there an elderly lady’s face was a mere blur; and some of the younger children had twitched themselves into wavering shadows, and might have passed for spirit-photographs of their own little ghosts. It was the standard family-group photograph, in which most Americans have figured at some time or other; and Lapham exhibited a just satisfaction in it. “I presume,” he mused aloud, as he put it back on top of his desk, “that we shan’t soon get together again, all of us.”
“And you say,” suggested Bartley, “that you stayed right along on the old place, when the rest cleared out West?”
“No‑o‑o‑o,” said Lapham, with a long, loud drawl; “I cleared out West too, first off. Went to Texas. Texas was all the cry in those days. But I got enough of the Lone Star in about three months, and I come back with the idea that Vermont was good enough for me.”
“Fatted calf business?” queried Bartley, with his pencil poised above his notebook.
“I presume they were glad to see me,” said Lapham, with dignity. “Mother,” he added gently, “died that winter, and I stayed on with father. I buried him in the spring; and then I came down to a little place called Lumberville, and picked up what jobs I could get. I worked round at the sawmills, and I was ostler a while at the hotel—I always did like a good horse. Well, I wa’n’t exactly a college graduate, and I went to school odd times. I got to driving the stage after while, and by and by I bought the stage and run the business myself. Then I hired the tavern-stand, and—well to make a long story short, then I got married. Yes,” said Lapham, with pride, “I married the schoolteacher. We did pretty well with the hotel, and my wife she was always at me to paint up. Well, I put it off, and put it off, as a man will, till one day I give in, and says I, ‘Well, let’s paint up. Why, Pert,’—m’wife’s name’s Persis—‘I’ve got a whole paint-mine out on the farm. Let’s go out and look at it.’ So we drove out. I’d let the place for seventy-five dollars a year to a shif’less kind of a Kanuck that had come down that way; and I’d hated to see the house with him in it; but we drove out one Saturday afternoon, and we brought back about a bushel of the stuff in the buggy-seat, and I tried it crude, and I tried it burnt; and I liked it. M’wife she liked it too. There wa’n’t any painter by trade in the village, and I mixed it myself. Well, sir, that tavern’s got that coat of paint on it yet, and it hain’t ever had any other, and I don’t know’s it ever will. Well, you know, I felt as if it was a kind of harumscarum experiment, all the while; and I presume I shouldn’t have tried it, but I kind of liked to do it because father’d always set so much store by his paint-mine. And when I’d got the first coat on,”—Lapham called it cut—“I presume I must have set as much as half an hour, looking at it and thinking how he would have enjoyed it. I’ve had my share of luck in this world, and I ain’t a-going to complain on my own account, but I’ve noticed that most things get along too late for most people. It made me feel bad, and it took
