CHAPTER XXVIII—BEING THE EPILOGUE
WHAT should there be more? My house stands upon a hill; waving, sighing trees are ranked about it, while to the eastward I have the shimmering stretches of the river beneath my feet. From a wooden seat between two beeches, I may see the fog-loom born of the dust and smoke of the city far away. At night, when clouds lie thick and low, the red reflection of the city's million lamps breaks on the sky as though a fire raged.
It is upon my seat between the beeches that I spend my days. Men would call my life a stagnant one; I care not, since I find it peace. I have neither hopes nor fears nor pains nor joys; there come no exaltations, no depressions; within me is a serenity—a kind of silence like the heart of nature.
At that I have no dimness; I roll and rock for hours on the dead swells of old days, while old faces and old scenes toss to and fro like seaweed with the tides of my memory. I am prey to no regrets, to no ambitions; my times own neither currents nor winds; I have outlived importance and the liking for it; and all those little noises that keep the world awake, I never hear.
My Sicilian, with his earrings and his crimson headwear of silk, is with me; for he could not have lived had I left him in town, being no more able to help himself than a ship ashore. Here he is busy and happy over nothing. He has whittled for himself a trio of little boats, and he sails them on the pond at the lawn's foot. One of these he has named the Democrat, while the others are the Republican and the Mugwump. He sails them against each other; and I think that by some marine sleight he gives the Democrat the best of it, since it ever wins, which is not true of politics. My Sicilian has just limped up the hill with a story of how, in the last race, the Republican and the Mugwump ran into one another and capsized, while the Democrat finished bravely.
Save for my Sicilian, and a flock of sable ravens that by their tameness and a confident self-sufficiency have made themselves part of the household, I pass the day between my beeches undisturbed. The ravens are grown so proud with safety that, when I am walking, they often hold the path against me, picking about for the grains my Sicilian scatters, keeping upon me the while a truculent eye that is half cautious, half defiant. In the spring I watch these ravens throughout their nest-building, they living for the most part in the trees about my house. I've known them to be baffled during a whole two days, when winds were blowing and the swaying of the branches prevented their labors.
Now and then I have a visit from Morton and the Reverend Bronson. The pair are as they were, only more age-worn and of a grayer lock. They were with me the other day; Morton as faultless of garb as ever, and with eyeglass as much employed, the Reverend Bronson as anxious as in the old time for the betterment of humanity. The spirit of unselfishness never flags in that good man's breast, although Morton is in constant bicker with him concerning the futility of his work.
“The fault isn't in you, old chap,” said Morton, when last they were with me; “it isn't, really. But humanity in the mass is such a beastly dullard, don't y' know, that to do anything in its favor is casting pearls before swine.”