It is night. The family are all abed. Grandfather sits by his old-fashioned fire. He draws his old-fashioned chair nearer to the hearth. On the stand which his mother gave him are the candlesticks, also of old time. The candles are three quarters burnt down; the fire on the hearth also is low. He has been thoughtful all day, talking half to himself, chanting a bit of verse, humming a snatch of an old tune. He kissed his pet granddaughter more tenderly than common, before she went to bed. He takes out of his bosom a little locket; nobody ever sees it. Therein are two little twists of hair. As Grandfather looks at them, the outer twist of hair becomes a whole head of ambrosial curls. He remembers stolen interviews, meetings by moonlight. He remembers how sweet the evening star looked, and how he laid his hand on another’s shoulder, and said, “You are my evening star.”
The church-clock strikes the midnight hour. He looks in his locket again. The other twist is the hair of his first-born son. At this same hour of midnight, once, many years ago, he knelt and prayed, when the long agony was over,—“My God, I thank thee that, though I am a father, I am still a husband, too! What am I, that unto me a life should be given and another spared!” Now he has children, and children’s children, the joy of his old age. But for many a year his wife has looked to him from beyond the evening star. She is still the evening star herself, yet more beautiful; a star that never sets; not mortal wife now, but angel.
The last stick on his andirons snaps asunder, and
falls outward. Two faintly smoking brands
stand there. Grandfather lays them
together, and they flame up; the
two smokes are united in one
flame. “Even so let it
be in heaven,” says
Grandfather.
Useless, do you say you are? You are of great use. You really are. How are you useful? By being a man that is old. Your old age is a public good. It is indeed. No child ever listens to your talk without having a good done it that no schooling could do. When you are walking, no one ever opens a gate for you to pass through, and no one ever honors you with any kind of help, without being himself the better for what he does; for fellow-feeling with you ripens his soul for him.—Mountford.
THE HOUSE IN THE MEADOW.
By LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON.
It stands in a sunny meadow,
The house so mossy and brown,
With its cumbrous old stone chimneys,