"Wooden clocks," sais I, helping her to the word. "Yes," sais I, "I am
Sam Slick the Clockmaker, at least what is left of me."
"Goodness gracious, Sir," said she, advancing and shaking hands
cordially with me, "how glad I am to see you! You don't recollect me
of course, I have grown so since we met, and I don't recollect your
features, for it is so long ago, but I mind seeing you at my father's
old house, Deacon Flint's, as well as if it was yesterday. We bought a
clock from you; you asked mother's leave to let you put it up, and
leave it in the room till you called for it. You said you trusted to
'soft sawder' to get it into the house, and to 'human natur' that it
should never come out of it. How often our folks have laughed over
that story. Dear, dear, only to think we should have ever met again,"
and going to a trunk she took out of a bark-box a silver sixpence with
a hole in it, by which it was suspended on a black ribbon.
"See, Sir, do you recollect that, you gave that to me for a keepsake?
you said it was 'luck-money.'"
"Well," sais I, "if that don't pass, don't it? Oh, dear, how glad I am
to see you, and yet how sad it makes me too! I am delighted at meetin'
you so onexpected, and yet it makes me feel so old it scares me. It
only seems as if it was the other day when I was at your father's
house, and since then yon have growd up from a little girl into a tall
handsome woman, got married, been settled, and are the mother of two
children.
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