Further, they gossiped, if paid in butter or fine flour or fat turkeys when these were scarce, Uncle John was certain to give an unusually strong blessing, perhaps insuring, on top of freedom from poverty and disease, the prolongation of life until the coming of the Messiah.

Yet it is not improbable that all these tales were insecurely based upon a single instance wherein one Starling Driggs, believing himself to stand in urgent need of a blessing, had offered to pay Uncle John for the service in vinegar.

It had been unexceptionable vinegar, as Uncle John himself admitted, but being a hundred miles from home, and having no way to carry it, the Patriarch had been obliged to refuse; which had seemed to most people not to have been more than fell within the lines of reason.
As for the other stories, it is enough to say that Uncle John was himself abundantly blessed with wives and children needing to be fed, that the labourer is worthy of his hire, and that it was sometimes vexatious to follow rapid fluctuations in the market value of butter, eggs, beef, potatoes, beet-molasses, and the like.

Certain it is that after money came to circulate it was a much more satisfactory business all around; two dollars a blessing--flat, and no grievances on either side, with a slight reduction if several were blessed in one family.
When Uncle John laid his hands upon a head after that, every one knew the exact pecuniary significance of the act.
When the Patriarch stopped at Amalon that spring, at the house of Joel Rae, there were many blessings to be made, and from morning until night for several days he was busy with the writing of them.

Two members of the household he interested to an uncommon degree,--the child, Prudence, who forthwith began daily to promise her dolls that they should not taste of death till Christ came, and Tom Potwin, the imbecile, who became for some unknown reason covetous of a blessing for himself.