"We were under full canvas,"—I can see the fine-featured old gentleman yet,—"we were in a zone of tempests, sailing round the Horn"—a wave of the hand here, and a pause.
What is "full canvas"? What is a "zone"? What is "Horn"? Indeed, we did not know. Be sure we did not interrupt the narrator to ask—not more than the audience arrests the ghost in "Hamlet" for exact definitions when it mouths out the sorrowful hollow words, "unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled."
The words defined themselves well enough for all practical and spiritual purposes. The mere sound of them was much, and the manner of saying them was much more. We got no definitions of "full canvas," "zone," or "Horn," for future reference; but what we did get was a present sense of some of the great allied human experiences—the unpitying power of the sea, the dread of a soul brought face to face with shipwreck and death, the quick awful moving of the "imminent hand of God," the cry of a coward, the fierce bravery of a brave man ready to fling life away for the sake of his fellows; then, the sense of a great deliverance and what we take to be the mercy of God. And beyond all these, for good measure, pressed down and running over, we had added unto us additional respect for those older and more experienced than ourselves, and the sense of a fine tale told tellingly.
But I would not have you suppose that I found all the old ladies and all the old gentlemen delightful. Some of them I disliked and wished gone. A sense of justice compels me to believe, however,—putting aside all question as to whether they charmed or disappointed us, and considering them only as purely educative mediums,—that these visitors of an older generation are not surpassed, indeed, are rarely equaled, by any theory or practice of modern pedagogy.
If Miss Lou Brooks and Eugene Ashton and Dr. Highway taught us much of foreign lands and strange worlds and spiritual astronomies; if they instructed me besides in the poetry and romance of life, these others gave me a knowledge and love and understanding of other times, other manners; they were a kind of incarnate treatises in history and ethics, philosophy, and comparative philology.
What a lesson in history and manners was my great-aunt Sarah for instance!
She was tall and stately, a kind of reproof to the shallowness of later days. There was about her the refinement and delicacy of a rare old vase. She had been young once; this my reason told me, for, in her home, a large stone house called "Scarlet Oaks," hung a very beautiful portrait of her, a delicate, very young, translucent face, rising above the shimmering satin of a low-cut wedding gown. But for this I should have taken her to have been always old, in the sense, I mean, in which the piping forms of youth, the "brede of marble men and maidens," on Keats's Grecian urn are "forever young, forever fair." There was such a finality and finish about her, like something arrested in its perfection; such achievement, such delicate completeness, it seemed, as could not change! It appeared that, when old age should waste our own generation, that delicate loveliness of her would remain untouched. She seemed already to live above, to survive, what was perishable and trivial in her own day and ours.
She affected cashmere shawls and cameos, and wore long and very elaborate mitts, and was always spoken of as "delicate." "Aunt Sarah is very delicate." That, indeed, she was!
We all waited upon my aunt Sarah, from the greatest to the least. She was very fond of my father, and to hear her address him as "William," and treat him with the condescension one gives to a child,—he who had iron-gray hair,—and to see his eager and affectionate and wholly respectful response, was to see time flow back.
My great-aunt had two brothers, my uncle Hays and my uncle William, who still wore great pointed collars, and black stocks that wound around the throat several times, and broadcloth coats. But my great-uncles, unlike my great-aunt, seemed passing by. There was in their somewhat careful, sometimes feeble step a suggestion of treaty and capitulation, and from time to time, in their glance or actions, the pathos of childlikeness so much more frequent in the old of that sex than of the other.