“When my grandmother was a little girl,” Ruth Elliot began, “she lived with her father and mother in a small country town among the New Hampshire hills:  and of all the stories she told in her old age about the quiet simple life of the people of Hilltown, the one her grandchildren liked best to hear was

THE STORY OF PARSON LORRIMER’S WHITE HORSE.

“Parson Lorrimer had lived thirty years in Hilltown before he owned a horse.  He began to preach in the big white meeting-house when he was a young man, and, as neither he nor his people wanted a change, when he was sixty years old he was preaching there still.  It was a scattered parish, with farm-houses perched on the hill-sides and nestled in the valleys; and the minister, in doing his work, had trudged over every mile of it a great many times.  He made nothing of walking five miles to a meeting on a December evening, with the thermometer below zero, or of climbing the hills in a driving snow-storm to visit a sick parishioner.  He was a tall, spare man, healthy and vigorous, with iron-gray hair, a strong kind face, and a smile in his brown eyes that made every baby in Hilltown stretch out its arms to him to be taken.

“Not a chick or child had Parson Lorrimer of his own.  He had never married, but lived in the old parsonage, a stately mansion, with rooms enough in it to accommodate a big family, with only an elderly widow and her grown-up son to minister to his wants and to keep him company.  His study was at the back of the house, and looked out upon the garden and orchard, so that the smell of his pinks and roses came to him as he wrote, and the same robins, year by year, built their nests within reach of his hand in the branches of the crooked old apple-tree that shaded his window.

“The minister was fond of caring for living creatures, both small and great, and every domestic animal about the place knew it.  The cat jumped fearlessly to his knee, sure of a welcome.  The cow lowed after him if he showed himself at the window.  The little chicks fluttered to his shoulder when he appeared in the door-yard, and the old sow with her litter of pigs kept close at his heels as he paced the orchard, pondering next Sunday’s sermon.

“He remembered them all.  There was always a handful of grain for the chickens in the pocket of his study-gown, a ripe pumpkin in the shed for Sukey; and the good man would laugh like a school-boy, as the funny little baby-pigs rolled and tumbled over each other for the apples he tossed them.  A great, good, gentle man, learned and wise in theology and knowledge of the Scriptures, with tastes and habits as simple as a child.

“But I must hurry on with my story, or you will think I am telling you more about the parson than his horse.  The good man realized, one day, that he was not as young as he used to be, and that climbing Harrison Hill on a July afternoon and walking five miles in a drizzling rain after a preaching service were not so easy to do as he had found them a dozen years before.  So he wisely concluded to call in the aid of four strong legs in carrying on his work, and that is how he came to buy a horse.