These all surrounded my venerable host and hostess, as they gently and calmly turned their feet towards the downward path of life, with intertwining hearts and hands—like a garland of roses enwreathing time-worn twin-trees—ever on the watch to lighten each burden they would fain have wholly assumed, and with loving care striving to put far off for them the evil day when the "grasshopper shall be a burden."
But I essay a vain task when I would picture such a scene for you, my friends. If I may hope that I have made a study, from which you will catch a passing suggestion for future use, in the limning of your own life-portraits, it is well.
Chancellor K——, who was my life-long friend, retained, even in the latest years of his lengthened life, an almost youthful sprightliness of feeling and manner. His son, himself a learned and distinguished son of the law, thought no duty more imperative, even in the prime of his manhood and in mid career in his honorable profession, than that of devotion to his father, in his declining years. He fixed his residence near, or with, his venerable parent, and, like the son of ancient Priam, long sustained the failing steps of age. Few things have impressed me more favorably, in my intercourse with the world, than this noble self-sacrifice.
No one unacquainted with my vivacious friend can appreciate the full expressiveness of his characteristic remark to me, on an occasion when his son happened to be the theme of conversation between us. "I like that young man amazingly!" said the chancellor.
I still remember the impression made on me, when a boy, by meeting, in the streets of my native city, a stalwart young sailor, arrayed in holiday dress, and walking with his mother, a little, withered old woman, in a decent black dress, hanging upon his arm. How often that powerful form, the impersonation of youth, health, and physical activity, has risen up before my mind's eye, in contrast with the little, tremulous figure he supported with such watchful care, and upon which such protecting tenderness breathed from every feature of his honest, weather-embrowned face.
Bob and Charley grew side by side, like two fine young saplings in a wood, for some years. After awhile, however, the brothers were separated. Bob went to a large city, became a merchant, grew rich, lived in a fine house, was a Bank Director, and an Alderman. His younger brother, pursuing a more modest, but equally manly and elevated career, seldom met Bob during some years, and then only briefly at their father's house, when there was a family gathering at Thanksgiving, or on some other similar occasion.
Once, when I chanced to see these young men together, thus, I remarked that, while the sisters of each clung round the neck of the unassuming, but true-hearted, right-minded Charley, at his coming, and lost no opportunity of being with him, the repellant manner of the elder brother held all more or less aloof, though none failed in polite observance towards him. Egotistical and pompous, he seemed to regard those about him as belonging to an inferior race. As his brother and I sat talking together near a table upon which were refreshments, he actually had the rudeness to reach between us for a glass, without the slightest word or token of apology, with his arm so near to his brother's face as almost to touch it! There was more of shame than indignation expressed in that fine, ingenuous countenance when it again met my unobstructed gaze, and I thought I detected a slight tremor in the sentence he uttered next in the order of our conversation.