Say, Auntie, wasn't
he?"
"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.
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