"'I am a man of strong will,' said he in conclusion, 'and at my first setting out in life as a poor unfriended youth, I resolved to make myself the possessor of such a mansion and estate as this, together with the revenue necessary to uphold it. I have succeeded to the extent of my utmost wish. And this is the estate which I have now concluded to dispose of.'
"'And your terms?' asked the Intelligencer, after taking down the particulars with which the stranger had supplied him.
"'Easy—abundantly easy!' answered the successful man, smiling, but with a stern and almost frightful contraction of the brow, as if to quell an inward pang. 'I have been engaged in various sorts of business—a distiller, a trader to Africa, an East India merchant, a speculator in the stocks—and in the course of these affairs have contracted an encumbrance of a certain nature. The purchaser of the estate shall merely be required to assume this burden to himself.
"'I understand you,' said the man of intelligence, putting his pen behind his ear. 'I fear that no bargain can be negociated on these conditions. Very probably, the next possessor may acquire the estate with a similar encumbrance, but it will be of his own contracting, and will not lighten your burden in the least.'"
Mr Hawthorne is by no means an equal writer. He is perpetually giving his reader, who, being pleased by parts, would willingly think well of the whole, some little awkward specimen of dubious taste. We confess, even in the above short extract, to having passed over a sentence or two, whose absence we have not thought it worth while to mark with asterisks, and which would hardly bear out our Addisonian compliment.
"But again the door is opened. A grandfatherly personage tottered hastily into the office, with such an earnestness in his infirm alacrity that his white hair floated backward, as he hurried up to the desk. This venerable figure explained that he was in search of To-morrow.
"'I have spent all my life in pursuit of it,' added the sage old gentleman, 'being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make haste; for unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it will finally escape me.'
"'This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable
friend,' said the man of intelligence, 'is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father into the region of the infinite. Continue your pursuit and you will doubtless come up with him; but as to the earthly gifts you expect, he has scattered them all among a throng of Yesterdays.'"
There is a nice bit of painting, as an artist might say, under the title of "The Old Apple-dealer." We have seen the very man in England. We had marked it for quotation, but it is too long, and we do not wish to mar its effect by mutilation.