This is what my grandmother did. She looked at her own portrait, at the portrait of her youth, with much the same feeling that I remember Prue as she was when I first saw her, with much the same feeling that I hope our grandchildren will remember us.
Upon those still summer mornings, though she stood withered and wan in a plain black silk gown, a close cap, and spectacles, and held her shrunken and blue-veined hand to shield her eyes, yet, as she gazed with that long and longing glance, upon the blooming beauty that had faded from her form forever, she recognized under that flowing hair and that rosy cheek—the immortal fashions of youth and health—and beneath those many ruffles and that quaint high waist, the fashions of the day—the same true and loving woman. If her face was pensive as she turned away, it was because truth and love are, in their essence, forever young; and it is the hard condition of nature that they cannot always appear so.
OUR COUSIN THE CURATE.
“Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The heart ungalled play;
For some must watch while some must sleep;
Thus runs the world away.”
Prue and I have very few relations: Prue, especially, says that she never had any but her parents, and that she has none now but her children. She often wishes she had some large aunt in the country, who might come in unexpectedly with bags and bundles, and encamp in our little house for a whole winter.
“Because you are tired of me, I suppose, Mrs. Prue?” I reply with dignity, when she alludes to the imaginary large aunt.
“You could take aunt to the opera, you know, and walk with her on Sundays,” says Prue, as she knits and calmly looks me in the face, without recognizing my observation.
Then I tell Prue in the plainest possible manner that, if her large aunt should come up from the country to pass the winter, I should insist upon her bringing her oldest daughter, with whom I would flirt so desperately that the street would be scandalized, and even the corner grocery should gossip over the iniquity.