Looking toward sunset

by Unknown

The old man went into his little garden-house, and I followed him. He whistled, and instantly his black squirrel came down from a tree, whither it had gone more for pleasure than for food. Nightingales, thrushes, starlings, and other birds, flew back into the open window from the tops of the trees. A bulfinch, whose color had been changed by age from red to black, strutted about the room, uttering droll sounds, which it could not make distinct. The hare pattered about in the twilight, sometimes on his hind feet, sometimes on all fours. Every dog in the house bounded forward in glad, loving, human glee. But the most joyful of all was the poodle; for he knew he was to have a box with compartments fastened to his neck, containing a list of the articles wanted for supper, which it was his business to bring from the inn in Bienenroda. He was Fibel’s victualler, or provision-wagon. Children, who ran back and forth, were the only other ones who ministered to his wants.

In allusion to his pets, he said: “We ought to assist the circumscribed faculties of animals, by educating them, as far as we can, since we stand toward them, in a certain degree, as their Lord God; and we ought to train them to good morals, too; for very possibly they may continue to live after death. God and the animals are always good; but not so with man.”

Aged men impart spiritual things, as they give material things, with a shaking hand, which drops half. In the effort to gather up his recollections, he permitted me to quicken his memory with my own; and thus I obtained a connected account of some particulars in his experience. He said he might have been about a hundred years old, when he cut a new set of teeth, the pain of which disturbed him with wild dreams. One night he seemed to be holding in his hands a large sieve, and it was his task to pull the meshes apart, one by one. The close net-work, and the fastening to the wooden rim, gave him indescribable trouble. But as his dream went on, he seemed to hold in his hand the great bright sun, which flamed up into his face. He woke with a new-born feeling, and slumbered again, as if on waving tulips. He dreamed again that he was a hundred years old, and that he died as an innocent yearling child, without any of the sin or woe of earth; that he found his parents on high, who brought before him a long procession of his children, who had remained invisible to him while he was in this world, because they were transparent, like the angels. He rose from his bed with new teeth and new ideas. The old Fibel was consumed, and a true Phœnix stood in his place, sunning its colored wings. He had risen glorified out of no other grave than his own body. The world retreated; heaven came down.

When he had related these things, he at once bade me good night. Without waiting for the return of his ministering poodle, and with hands folded for prayer, he showed me the road. I withdrew, but I rambled a long time round the orchard, which had sprung entirely from seed of his own planting. Indeed he seldom ate a cherry without smuggling the stone and burying it in the ground for a resurrection. This habit often annoyed the neighboring peasants, who did not want high things growing on their boundaries. “But,” said he, “I cannot destroy a fruit-stone. If the peasants pull up the tree it produces, it will still have lived a little while, and die as a child dies.”

While loitering in the orchard, I heard an evening hymn played and sung. I returned near Fibel’s window, and saw him slowly turning a hand-organ, and accompanying the tune by softly singing an evening hymn. This organ, aided by his fragment of a voice, sufficed, in its monotonous uniformity, for his domestic devotion. I went away repeating the song.

Beautiful was the orchard when I returned the next morning. And the hoar-frost of age seemed thawed and fluid, and to glisten only as morning dew on Fibel’s after-blossom. The affection of his animals toward him rendered the morning still more beautiful, in an orchard every tree of which had for its mother the stone of some fruit that he had enjoyed. His animals were an inheritance from his parents; though, of course they were the great, great, great grandchildren of those which had belonged to them. The trees were full of brooding birds, and by a slight whistle he could lure down to his shoulders this tame posterity of his father’s singing-school. It was refreshing to the heart to see how quickly the tender flutterers surrounded him.

With the infantine satisfaction of a gray-headed child, he was accustomed to hang up on sticks, or in the trees, wherever the rays of the sun could best shine upon them, little balls of colored glass; and he took indescribable delight in this accordion of silver, gold, and jewel hues. These parti-colored sun-balls, varying the green with many flaming tints, were like crystal tulip-beds. Some of the red ones seemed like ripe apples among the branches. But what charmed the old man most were reflections of the landscape from these little world-spheres. They resembled the moving prospects shadowed forth in a diminishing mirror. “Ah,” said he, “when I contemplate the colors produced by the sunshine, which God gives to this dark world, it seems to me as if I had departed, and were already with God. And yet, since He is in us, we are always with God.”

I asked him how it happened that, at his age, he spoke German almost purer than that used even by our best writers. Counting his birth from the end of his century [the new birth described in his dream], he replied: “I was somewhere about two years old, when I happened to hear a holy, spiritual minister, who spoke German with such an angel tongue, that he would not have needed a better in heaven. I heard him every Sabbath during several years.” He could not tell me the preacher’s name, but he vividly described his manner in the pulpit. He told how he spoke with no superfluity of words, airs, or gestures; how he uttered, in mild tones, things the most beautiful and forcible; how, like the Apostle John, with his resting-place close to heaven, this man spoke to the world, laying his hands calmly on the pulpit-desk, as an arm-case; how his every tone was a heart, and his every look a blessing; how the energy of this disciple of Christ was embedded in love, as the firm diamond is encased in ductile gold; how the pulpit was to him a Mount Tabor, whereon he transfigured both himself and his hearers; and how, of all clergymen, he best performed that which is the most difficult,—the praying worthily.

My feelings grew constantly warmer toward this time-worn man, while I did not require a full return of affection from him any more than I should from a little child. But I remembered that I ought not to disturb the evening of his days with things of the world, and that I ought to depart. I would have him preserve undisturbed that sublime position of old age, where man lives, as it were, at the pole; where no star rises or sets; where the whole firmament is motionless and clear, while the Pole-Star of another world shines fixedly overhead. I therefore said to him, that I would return in the evening, and take my leave. To my surprise, he replied, that perhaps he should himself take leave of the whole world at evening, and that he wished not to be disturbed when dying. He said that he should that evening read to the end of the Revelation of St. John, and perhaps it might be the end with him also. I ought to have mentioned previously that he read continually, and read nothing but the Bible, regularly through from the beginning to the end; and he had a fixed impression that he should depart on concluding the twentieth and twenty-first verses of the twenty-second chapter of the Revelation of John: “He which testifieth of these things saith, Surely I come quickly: Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.” In consequence of this belief, he was in the habit of reading the last books of the Bible faster.

Little as I believed in so sudden a withering of his protracted after-blossom, I obeyed his latest-formed wish. Whenever a right wish is expressed by any man, we should do well to remember that it may be his last. I took my leave, requesting him to intrust me with his testamentary commissions for the village. He said they had been taken charge of long ago, and the children knew them. He cut a twig from a Christmas-tree, coeval with his childhood, and presented me with it as a keepsake.