THE OLD NEW HOUSE.

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BY H. HASTINGS WELD.

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Many a kind heart beats under a rough exterior. Such a heart was old Simon Gray’s, and in appearance he was rude and uncourtly enough. People said he was crazed, but his madness never was exhibited in any unkindness, or in any injustice. Nor was he at all deficient in his business management, or incoherent in his conversation, when he chose to converse. Simon was a man of few words—to others—though his lips often moved, as if he talked to himself. When he did speak audibly there was good will even in his harshest tone; and the pale blue eyes, which were deep set under his bushy brows, beamed with kindness, when once you had passed their forbidding portals. Strange boys and chance comers were afraid of the old man, as he sat at the door of the old new house where he had dwelt for many, many years in bachelorhood; but those who knew him had always a kind word, and he had a cheerful answer. His especial pet was a little fair-haired girl, whom he seemed to love with the affection of a protector as well as parent. He tried to shield her that even the wind might not visit her too roughly; and she on her part looked up to him with a confidence, love, and trust, which would make it seem almost that she knew him to be more than human. Both are dead now, else might we not write this story, for it would have given the old man pain, and made a revelation to the young child of which she died happily ignorant. Nor, so far as we know are there any, who under our altered names of persons and places, and the absence of dates, will recognize the characters. If there are, they will admit that we do old Simon no more than justice; or if they knew him but slightly they will love a memory which has hitherto been to them only that of a bizarre old man.

We have called the house old and new. Old it certainly was, as the blackened boards and other marks of time showed—prematurely old, from neglect. And yet it appeared new too, in that the building was never entirely finished. Paint, plaster, and care have made a new place of it since the time of which we write, for it has passed into strange hands. Why it presented the appearance of which we have been speaking, will appear in our narrative.

Simon Gray’s life opened happily. There was nothing which indicated for him a splendid destiny. The path which seemed open before him was obscure, and promised to embrace only the ordinary incidents of ninety-nine lives in a hundred; but it so befell that his experience showed that strange things may happen as well to the humble as to the exalted. The prince has gilded play-things, the peasant boy plain. Both are toys after all, and both the possessors are children. Both grow up to be men only, and in every man’s heart the thoughts are mightier to himself than the marching of an army with banners.