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.