On such an occasion, he felt he might, without evading his convictions, compensate for a few of the impositions a long line of Tramp Room guests had thrust upon him. He sometimes wished that he might come upon an able-bodied tramp who had crawled into the haymow or straw stack and slept there without asking. When an especially viciouslooking tramp arrived to ask for food and shelter, my grandfather, had he followed his true impulses, would have said briefly, ‘I have no use for drones here.’ But the surliest vagrant who ever begged for a meal could, by simply ‘asking,’ close my grandfather’s lips, shackle his impulses, and win a night’s rest in a feather bed. He had nothing but contempt and suspicion for men who went drifting aimlessly through life, maintaining a parasitic existence at the expense of their fellows. But though in this way my grandfather fulfilled the letter of his religious law, he did it with bad grace. No vagabond who, in accordance with the Scriptures, ‘asked’ for lodging had ever been turned away. Thus, because in Matthew there is a verse that reads ‘Give to him that asketh thee,’ there was in my grandfather’s house a room called the Tramp Room. My grandparents had both been reared within the strict observances of a small religious sect which set great store by the literal application of the Scriptures to everyday life. This announcement struck deep to the heart of a secret grievance. I found him sleepin’ in the straw stack.’ He had gone no further than this in his examination of the stranger when John Dunn, the hired man, said: ‘I told him if he’d clean out the stables we’d give him his breakfast. One morning, cheerful from some minor victory over the stubborn gears of a model hay-hoist, he came tardily into his dining room to find among the members of his household a little man with a face and bald crown quite red from recent scrubbings.
OFTEN, after his eldest daughter had turned fifteen and after Lenny had taken the care of a dozen horses to himself, my grandfather spent that chore period between rising and breakfast in his workshop.
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