They went ashore, neither of them altogether devoid of fear and trembling, and sat down on the grassy bank, by the side of their venerable friend. He soon talked away their timidity; and seemed so mild and affectionate, that in a few minutes they were chatting and laughing as merrily as ever children could. He showed them his garden, his trees, and flowers, and fruits. He gave them a little basket, which they filled with strawberries, some of which he squeezed between his fingers and rubbed on her cheeks, to see he said, if they could be made any redder. In fine, he amused them so much with his stories, and was so pleasant and kind, that they fell more than ever in love with him; and after promising a dozen times to come and see him every week while it was summer, they returned gaily home.
But the old man died at last. The children went up one sunshiny morning to pay him a visit, and found the house all still, and the door locked. They knocked and knocked, but no one answered. They peeped in at the window and saw him stretched at length on the bed, fully dressed, with a handkerchief over his face, and his gray hair lying dishevelled on the pillow. They called to him; but still there was no answer. Then they became alarmed, and hurried home. Some men came up, broke open the door, and found him dead. Without sickness, or premonition of any kind, he had calmly passed away.
They dug his grave by the side of the cottage, and laid him in it, with his feet to the east and his head to the west; and left him to rest there, unknown and unnamed in death, as he had been in life. The whole village, men, and women, and children, mourned for him many days. But when the days of lamentation were ended, and they saw his face no more, though their grief abated, his memory did not, and has not yet passed from their hearts.
I observed the voice of my hostess to falter more than once, while telling this simple and dream-like story of her childhood. I could see by the night-lights too that her bright eyes sometimes became brighter and sometimes dimmer; both of which circumstances made it only the more pleasant for me to sit and listen to her words.
‘There were no letters,’ she said, found in his possession from which they could learn his name. There were no writings of any kind, except a bundle of old papers, which she had looked into, but they seemed to be only disconnected thoughts and memoranda of events and feelings, and threw no light on his history. At my request she produced a lamp and spread out the papers on the table. I turned over the worn and time-stained manuscripts; but the leaves were loose, unnumbered, and put together at random, and it was some time before I could find a place to begin at.
At length, however, I managed to bring a few sheets in juxtaposition, such, that with a little stretch of the imagination I could discern a slight connection between them. And thus, by dim lamp-light, alone, with the silence of night around, and the old house lifting up its dark and shadowy form in the distance, I read some of the old man’s papers.
Those which I read I took the liberty of putting into my portmanteau, arguing that though they might be of no use to me, they certainly would be of none to their present possessors. Some of these papers having appeared in the Knickerbocker, and met with ‘acceptance bounteous,’ I am induced to transcribe for the edification of the reader, a portion of the autobiography of the writer. It is contained in the last chapter, or sheet, and is written in a different and more aged hand than the rest; and gives the ‘moving why’ of the old man, in isolating himself from his kind, in one of the great green deserts of the West, ‘for which the speech of England hath no name.’
A DREAM OF YOUTH.
Sixty years old! Many sorrows, many storms encountered, both within and without, and much journeying along the road of life, have left their traces on my features and on my head; but I am thankful that they have not touched my heart. I live alone, but not solitary; for I hold daily communion with the absent and beloved; communion also, sad but sweet, with the departed. The forms of those once hated too, are ready to rise up at my bidding; but they are never summoned. For I wish all within me to be gentleness and repose; and it ill becomes me on this my last failing foothold on the verge of the grave, to allow thoughts of hatred to stir up the turbid waters of bitterness which have been slumbering so many years in my heart.
So I stand up here calmly at the end of my journey, and look back on the path which I have trodden. And what a path! Far back it runs, growing fainter and narrower, till I lose sight of it, an indistinct line, in the distance. I shall not say how many steep hills it crosses, where it might better have kept in the plains; how many deviations it makes from a straight course, apparently for the sole purpose of wandering through difficult places; or how often it runs along over burning sandy deserts, parallel with, and but a few steps from, the verge of a cool and pleasant meadow. I shall say nothing of this; for of the million of paths that intersect this vast plain of Life, there is probably not one which, when the traveller looks back upon it, does not like mine seem marked out by the veriest caprice of chance. Each one gropes its way along, like the crooked track of a blind man; and when it would appear the easier and almost the only way to keep on up the gentle eminence, whereon might have been found renown and happiness, by that same constant fatality, it suddenly turns short off to one side, plunges down into the rocky ravine, and pants on, for many a weary mile. That man shapes not his own ends, is a truth which I felt long since, and which each day’s experience brings home to me with the freshness of a new discovery. It is a truth which rises up and mocks us, when we sit down to calculate or plan for the future; and it almost staggers our confidence in the connection between human means and the desired result.