"A Soliloquy on my only faithful and never-failing friend,—my beloved and valued crooked stick.
"Ay, there thou art,—my own crooked stick!—My heart cleaves to thee, in thy crookedness; and I love thus to look upon thee, more and more, daily, as thou leanest by the wall in that corner,—remembering that thou and I were not always tenants of an alms-house.
"I love to look upon thee, with a melancholy yet pleasurable love, beholding that thou preservest thy crooked identity,—yea, remainest as crooked as ever thou wert! I know not whether aught within me, or, indeed, any thing but thyself without me, be still the same as on that beautiful summer eve when, more than fifty years ago, I cut thee from the venerable crab-tree whereon thou didst grow, and we formed our inseparable friendship.
"The wise men of this age would tell me that not a particle of the body I had then, at nineteen, is to be found in this old body of threescore and ten,—but that blood, bone, brains, and all its other youthful components, are changed. I know not, my dear crooked crab-stick, how truly they may speak; but this I know,—that I then was proud of a perfect and spotless array of teeth, while, now, my old gums are tenantless; that then my eyes were sharp and strong, while now I see, with the utmost difficulty, objects removed half a yard from my nose; that then my ears were instruments of use, and porches for receiving the brain's most precious visitants, the sounds of music,—while, now, they only serve to plague me when I see people's lips moving, and think, like other old fools, that folks are always talking about me; and, that I used to have 'a handsome head of hair,' as my barber always called it, on quarter-day, when he expected his salary,—while, now, I behold a perpetual winter above my brow, and on my brow itself!
"But, ah! my faithful friend, why should I lament the changes which have come upon me? Fate, or Fortune, or whatever power I might fancifully charge with my evil day, cannot avenge herself of me so bitterly as she might,—if I had teeth to be set on edge with inferior food,—eyes to be offended with the rude shapes of this straw mattrass and rush-bottomed chair,—ears to be tormented with the jangling of earthen porringers, as the poor deaf old woman knocks them against each other,—and hair which I could not dress for lack of a mirror!
"And then, as to my inner man, good lack, my beloved crooked crab-stick! though thou remainest the same, how is this my inner man changed! ay, how hath it changed and changed again, since our first dear friendship was formed! Yet I said in my heart, once, that my mind could never change in its regard for what I was pleased to call 'certain great principles!' Alack! I have lived to feel uncertain about the certainty and greatness of almost all principles! and——
"But stop! how is this, that having taken thee into my hand, I begin, just now, to question the reality of thy crookedness? Art thou really so very, very crooked, my dearly beloved stick?
"There! I place thee, again, in thy own corner, that so thou mayst lean against thy own spot in the wall, and lo! thy crookedness is made, once more, fully manifest! No, no, my friend—for Hugh Clifford loves thee too well and sincerely to call himself thy 'master,' and think of thee as of a slave!—no, no, it is too late in life for the 'beggared gentleman' to deceive himself—thou art crooked, crooked indeed!
"But ah! my beloved stick, it is for thy crookedness I love thee, above all, though not for it alone. I avow to thee, as I have often avowed, in times past, when no human ear heard me, that I thank thee, my faithful, crooked, unfailing friend, for all thy service. Twice, when wielded by my right arm, didst though enable me to deliver a weak fellow-creature from his stronger, who would have slain him because he had not filthy gold or silver to satisfy the robber: ten times didst thou empower me to wrest open the cottage doors of dying human beings deserted by their kind, and unable to arise and welcome their deliverer: nay, once didst thou enable me to preserve my own poor life when the plunderer who now possesseth my house and land would have secretly and bloodily taken it!