 CHAPTER IX of THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABELS Truly was there something high, generous, and noble in the native composition of our poor old Hepsiba, or else—and it was quite as probably the case—she had been enriched by poverty, developed by sorrow, elevated by the strong and solitary affection of her life, and thus endowed with heroism, which never could have characterized her in what are called happier circumstances. Through dreary years Hepsiba had looked forward, for the most part, despairingly, never with any confidence of hope, but always with the feeling that it was her brightest possibility, to the very position in which she now found herself. On her own behalf she had asked nothing of Providence but the opportunity of devoting herself to this brother whom she had so loved, so admired for what he was, or might have been, and to whom she had kept her faith alone of all the world, wholly, unfalteringly, at every instant, and throughout life. And here, in his late decline, the lost one had come back out of his long and strange misfortune, and was thrown on her sympathy, as it seemed, not merely for the bread of his physical existence, but for everything that should keep him morally alive. She had responded to the call. She had come forward, our poor, gaunt Hepsiba, in her rusty silks, with her rigid joints, and the sad perversity of her scowl, ready to do her utmost, and with affection enough, if that were all, to do a hundred times as much. There could be a few more tearful sights, and heaven forgive us if a smile insist on mingling with our conception of it, few sights with truer pathos in them than Hepsiba presented on that first afternoon. How patiently did she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great warm love, and make it all the world to him, so that he should retain no torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without, her little efforts to amuse him, how pitiful, yet magnanimous they were. Remembering his early love of poetry and fiction, she unlocked a bookcase, and took down several books that had been excellent reading in their day. There was a volume of Pope, with the rape of the lock in it, and another of the Tatler, and an odd one of Dryden's miscellaneous, all with tarnish gilding on their covers, and thoughts of tarnished brilliancy inside. They had no success with Clifford. These and all such writers of society, whose new works glow like the rich texture of a just woven carpet, must be content to relinquish their charm for every reader, after an age or two, and could hardly be supposed to retain any portion of it for a mind that had utterly lost its estimate of modes and manners. Havseba then took up Rasilas, and began to read of the Happy Valley, with a vague idea that some secret of a contented life had there been elaborated, which might at least serve Clifford and herself for this one day. But the Happy Valley had a cloud over it. Havseba troubled her auditor, moreover, by innumerable sins of emphasis which he seemed to detect without any reference to the meaning. Or, in fact, did he appear to take much note of the sense of what she read, but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture without harvesting its profit. His sister's voice, too, naturally harsh, had, in course of her sorrowful lifetime, contracted a kind of croak, which, when it once gets into the human throat, is as in eradicable as sin. In both sexes, occasionally, this lifelong croak, accompanying each word of joy or sorrow, is one of the symptoms of a settled melancholy, and wherever it occurs, the whole history of misfortune is conveyed in its slightest accent. The effect is as if the voice had been dyed black, or, if we must use a more moderate simile, this miserable croak, running through all the variations of the voice, is like a black, silken thread, on which the crystal beads of speech are strung, and whence they take their hue. Such voices have put on mourning for dead hopes, and they ought to die and be buried along with them. Discerning the Clifford was not gladdened by her efforts, Hepseba searched about the house for the means of more exhilarating pastime. At one time, her eyes chanced to rest on Alice Pinchon's harpsichord. It was a moment of great peril, for, despite the traditionary awe that had gathered over this instrument of music, and the dirges with spiritual fingers were said to play on it, the devoted sister had solemn thoughts of thrumming on its chords for Clifford's benefit, and accompanying the performance with her voice. Poor Clifford, poor Hepseba, poor harpsichord, all three would have been miserable together. By some good agency, possibly by the unrecognized interposition of the long-buried Alice herself, the threatening calamity was averted. But the worst of all, the hardest stroke of fate for Hepseba to endure, and perhaps for Clifford, too, was his invincible distaste for her appearance. Her features never the most agreeable, and now harsh with age and grief, and resentment against the world for his sake. Her dress, and especially her turban, the queer and quaint manners which had unconsciously grown upon her in solitude, such being the poor gentlewoman's outward characteristics, it is no great marvel, although the mournfulest of pities, that the instinctive lover of the beautiful was feigned to turn away his eyes. There was no help for it. It would be the latest impulse to die within him. In his last extremity, the expiring breath stealing faintly through Clifford's lips, he would doubtless press Hepseba's hand in fervent recognition of all her lavished love and close his eyes, but not so much to die as to be constrained to look no longer on her face. Poor Hepseba! She took counsel with herself what might be done, and thought of putting ribbons on her turban, but by the instant rush of several guardian angels was withheld from an experiment that could hardly have proved less than fatal to the beloved object of her anxiety. To be brief, besides Hepseba's disadvantages of person, there was an uncouthness pervading all her deeds, a clumsy something that could but ill adapt itself for use, and not at all for ornament. She was a grief to Clifford, and she knew it. In this extremity, the antiquated virgin turned to Phoebe. No groveling jealousy was in her heart. Had it pleased Heaven to crown the heroic fidelity of her life by making her personally the medium of Clifford's happiness, it would have rewarded her for all the past by a joy with no bright tints, indeed, but deep and true, and worth a thousand gayer ecstasies. This could not be. She therefore turned to Phoebe, and resigned the task into the young girl's hands. The latter took it up cheerfully, as she did everything, but with no sense of omission to perform, and succeeding all the better for that same simplicity. By the involuntary effect of a genial temperament, Phoebe soon grew to be absolutely essential to the daily comfort, if not the daily life, of her two forlorn companions. The grime and sordidness of the house of the seven gables seemed to have vanished since her appearance there. The gnawing tooth of the dry-rot was stayed among the old timbers of its skeleton frame. The dust had ceased to settle down so densely from the antique ceilings upon the floors and furniture of the rooms below. Or at any rate there was a little housewife, as light-footed as the breeze that sweeps a garden-walk, gliding hither and thither to brush it all away. The shadows of gloomy events that haunted the else-lonely and desolate apartments, the heavy, breathless scent which death had left in more than one of the bed-chambers ever since his visits of long ago. These were less powerful than the purifying influence scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence of one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart. There was no morbidness in Phoebe. If there had been, the old pinch on house was the very locality to ripen it into incurable disease. But now her spirit resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of ater of rose in one of Hepsibus' huge, higher-bound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the various articles of linen and wrought lace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings, folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there. As every article in the great trunk was the sweeter for the rose scent, so did all the thoughts and emotions of Hepsibus and Clifford, sombre as they might seem, acquire a subtle attribute of happiness from Phoebe's inner mixture with them. Her activity of body, intellect, and heart impelled her continually to perform the ordinary little toils that offered themselves around her, and to think the thought proper for the moment, and to sympathize, now with the twittering gaiety of the robins and the pear-tree, and now to such a depth as she could with Hepsibus' dark anxiety or the vague moan of her brother. This facile adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best preservative. A nature like Phoebe's has invariably its due influence, but is seldom regarded with due honor. Its spiritual force, however, may be partially estimated by the fact of her having found a place for herself amid circumstances so stern as those which surrounded the mistress of the house, and also by the effect which she produced on a character of so much more mass than her own. For the gaunt, bony frame, and limbs of Hepsibus, as compared with the tiny, light-someness of Phoebe's figure, were perhaps in some fit proportion with the moral weight and substance, respectively, of the woman and the girl. To the guest, to Hepsibus' brother, or cousin Clifford, as Phoebe now began to call him, she was especially necessary. Not that he could ever be said to converse with her, or often manifest, in any other very definite mode, his sense of a charm in her society. But if she were a long while absent he became pettish and nervously restless, pacing the room to and fro with the uncertainty that characterized all his movements, or else would sit broodingly in his great chair, rusting his head on his hands, and evincing life only by an electric sparkle of ill-humour whenever Hepsibus endeavored to arouse him. Phoebe's presence, and the contiguity of her fresh life to his blighted one, was usually all that he required. Indeed, such was the native gush in play of her spirit that she was seldom perfectly quiet and undemonstrative, any more than a fountain ever seizes to dimple and warble with its flow. She possessed the gift of song, and that too so naturally that you would as little think of inquiring whence she had caught it, or what master had taught her, as of asking the same questions about a bird, in whose small strain of music we recognize the voice of the creator as distinctly as in the loudest accents of his thunder. So long as Phoebe sang she might stray at her own will about the house, Clifford was content, whether the sweet, airy homeliness of her tones came down from the upper chambers, or along the passageway from the shop, or was sprinkled through the foliage of the pear-tree, inward from the garden with the twinkling sun-beams, he would sit quietly, with a gentle pleasure gleaming over his face, brighter now, and now a little dimmer, as the song happened to float near him, or was more remotely heard. Phoebe pleased him best, however, when she sat on a low footstool at his knee. It is perhaps remarkable, considering her temperament, that Phoebe oftener chose a strain of pathos than of gaiety, but the young and happy are not ill-pleased to temper their life with a transparent shadow. The deepest pathos of Phoebe's voice and song, moreover, came sifted through the golden texture of a cheery spirit, and was somehow so interfused with the quality then sequired that one's heart felt all the lighter for having wept at it. Broad mirth, in the sacred presence of dark misfortune, would have jarred harshly and irreverently with the solemn symphony that rolled its undertone through Hepsibas and her brother's life. For it was well that Phoebe so often chose sad themes, and not amiss that they ceased to be so sad when she was singing them. Becoming habituated to her companionship, Clifford readily showed how capable of imbibing pleasant tints and gleams of cheerful light from all quarters his nature must originally have been. He grew youthful when she sat by him, a beauty, not precisely real, even in its utmost manifestation, and which a painter would have watched long to seize and fix upon his canvas, and after all in vain, beauty nevertheless that was not a mere dream would sometimes play upon and illuminate his face. It did more than to illuminate. It transfigured him with an expression that could only be interpreted as the glow of an exquisite and happy spirit. That gray hair and those furrows, with their record of infinite sorrows so deeply written across his brow, and so compressed as with a futile effort to crowd in all the tale, that the whole inscription was made illegible. These for the moment vanished, and I at once tender and acute might have beheld in the man some shadow of what he was meant to be. Anon, as age came stealing like a sad twilight back over his figure, you would have felt tempted to hold an argument with destiny, and affirm that either this being should not have been made mortal, or mortal existence should have been tempered to his qualities. There seemed no necessity for his having drawn breath at all. The world never wanted him, but, as he had breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air. The same perplexity will invariably haunt us with regards to natures that tend to feed exclusively upon the beautiful, let their earthly fate be as lenient as it may. Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell. Nor was it necessary. The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semi-circle of faces round about it. But need not know the individuality of one among them all. Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in Clifford's traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose fear lay so much in the actual as Phoebe's did. For Clifford, however, the reality and simplicity and thorough homeliness of the girl's nature were as powerful a charm as any that she possessed. Beauty, it is true, and beauty, almost perfect in its own style, was indispensable. Had Phoebe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily, of a harsh voice, and uncouthly mannered, she might have been rich with all good gifts beneath this unfortunate exterior, and still, so long as she wore the guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford, and depressed him by her lack of beauty. But nothing more beautiful, nothing prettier, at least, was ever made than Phoebe. And therefore to this man, whose whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence heretofore, and until both his heart and fancy died within him had been a dream, whose images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and been frozen, like the pictures of secluded artist, into the chillest ideality, to him this little figure of the cheeriest household life was just what he required to bring him back into the breathing world. Persons who had wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to be led back. They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountaintop, or in a dungeon. Now Phoebe's presence made a home about her, that very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate, the wretch beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above it, instinctively pines after, a home. She was real. Holding her hand you felt something, a tender something, a substance, and a warm one. And so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion. By looking a little further in this direction we might suggest an explanation of an often suggested mystery. Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsmen, as well as that of the ideal craftsmen of the spirit? Because probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse, but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger. It was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between this pair, so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birthday to hers. On Clifford's part it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the liveliest sensibility to feminine influence, but who had never quaffed the cup of passionate love, and knew that it was now too late. He knew it, with the instinctive delicacy that had survived his intellectual decay. Thus his sentiment for Phoebe, without being paternal, was not less chaste than if she had been his daughter. He was a man, it is true, and recognized her as a woman. She was his only representative of womankind. He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained to her sex, and saw the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal development of her bosom. All her little womanly ways, budding out of her like blossoms on a young fruit tree, had their effect on him, and sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of pleasure. At such moments, for the effect was seldom more the momentary, the half-torped man would be full of harmonious life, just as a long silent harp is full of sound when the musician's fingers sweep across it. But after all, it seemed rather a perception, or a sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual. He read Phoebe as he would a sweet and simple story. He listened to her as if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, in requital of his bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel that most pitied him to warble through the house. He was not an actual fact for him, but the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warmly home to his conception, so that this symbol, or lifelike picture, had almost the comfort of reality. But we strive in vain to put the idea into words, no adequate expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us is attainable. This being made only for happiness, and here to force so miserably failing to be happy. His tendency so hideously thwarted that, some unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character, never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now imbecile. This poor forlorn voyager from the islands of the blessed, in a frail bark on a tempestuous sea, had been flung by the last mountain-wave of his shipwreck into a quiet harbour. There as he lay more than half-lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly rosebud had come to his nostrils, and, as odour's will, had summoned up reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid which he should have had his home. With his native susceptibility of happy influences, he inhales the slight ethereal rapture into his soul, and expires. And how did Phoebe regard Clifford? The girls was not one of those natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in human character. The path which would best have suited her was the well-worn track of ordinary life. The companions in whom she would most have delighted were such as one encounters at every turn. The mystery which enveloped Clifford, so far as it affected her at all, was an annoyance, rather than the pecanth charm which many women might have found in it. Still, her native kindness was brought strongly into play, not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation, nor so much even by the finer graces of his character, as by the simple appeal of a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers. She gave him an affectionate regard, because he needed so much love, and seemed to have received so little. With a ready tact, the result of ever-active and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good for him, and did it. Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience, she ignored, and thereby kept her intercourse healthy by the unconscious, but as it were, heaven-directed freedom of her whole conduct. The sick in mind, and perhaps in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them. They are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath in infinite repetition. But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of purer air. She impregnated it too, not with a wildflower scent, for wildness was no trait of hers. But with the perfume of garden roses, pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness, which nature and men have consented together in making grow from summer to summer and from century to century, such a flower was Phoebe in her relation with Clifford, and such the delight that he inhaled from her. Yet, it must be said, her petal sometimes drooped a little in consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her. She grew more thoughtful than heretofore. Being aside at Clifford's face, and seeing the dim, unsatisfactory elegance and the intellect almost quenched, she would try to inquire what had been his life. Was he always thus? Had this veil been over him from his birth, this veil under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed, and through which he had so imperfectly discerned the actual world? Or was its gray texture woven of some dark calamity? Phoebe loved no riddles, and would have been glad to escape the perplexity of this one. Nevertheless, there was so far a good result of her meditations on Clifford's character, that when her involuntary conjectures, together with the tendency of every strange circumstance to tell its own story, had gradually taught her the fact it had no terrible effect upon her. Let the world have done him what vast wrong it might, she knew cousin Clifford too well, or fancied so, ever to shudder at the touch of his thin delicate fingers. Within a few days after the appearance of this remarkable inmate, the routine of life had established itself with a good deal of uniformity in the old house of our narrative. In the morning, very shortly after breakfast, it was Clifford's custom to fall asleep in his chair, nor, unless accidentally disturbed, would he emerge from a dense cloud of slumber, or the thinner mist that flitted to or fro, until well towards noonday. These hours of drowsy head were the season of the old gentlewoman's attendance on her brother, while Phoebe took charge of the shop, an arrangement which the public speedily understood, and evinced their decided preference of the younger shopwoman by the multiplicity of their calls during her administration of affairs. Dinner over, Hepsiba took her knitting work, a long stalking of gray yarn, for her brother's winter wear, and with a sigh and a scowl of affectionate farewell to Clifford, and a gesture in joining watchfulness on Phoebe, went to take her seat behind the counter. It was now the young girl's turn to be the nurse, the guardian, the playmate, or whatever is the fitter phrase of the gray-haired man. End of chapter. CHAPTER X. OF THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. This Lieberbach's recording is in the public domain and is read by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. CHAPTER X. THE PINCHON GARDEN. Clifford, except for Phoebe's more active instigation, would ordinarily have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being, and which sluggishly counseled him to sit in his morning chair till even tide. But the girl seldom failed to propose the removal to the garden, where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor, or summer-house, that it was now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers. The hopvine, too, had begun to grow luxuriously over the sides of the little edifice, and made an interior of verdant seclusion with innumerable peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden. Here sometimes, in this green play-place of flickering light, Phoebe read to Clifford. Her acquaintance, the artist, who appeared to have a literary turn, had supplied her with works of fiction in pamphlet form, and a few volumes of poetry in altogether a different style and taste from those which Hepsibus selected for his amusement. Small thanks were due to the books, however, if the girl's readings were in any degree more successful than her elderly cousins. Phoebe's voice had always a pretty music in it, and could either in live in Clifford by its sparkle and gaiety of tone, or soothe him by a continued flow of pebbly and brook-like cadences. But the fictions, in which the country girl, unused to works of that nature, often became deeply absorbed, interested her strange auditor very little or not at all. Pictures of life, scenes of passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and pathos were all thrown away, or worse than thrown away, on Clifford. Either because he lacked an experience by which to test their truth, or because his own griefs were a touchstone of reality that few feigned emotions could withstand. When Phoebe broke into a peel of merry laughter at what she read, he would now and then laugh for sympathy, but often her respond with a troubled, questioning look. If a tear, a maiden's sunshiny tear over imaginary woe, dropped upon some melancholy page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else grew peevish and angrily motioned her to close the volume, and wisely, too, is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest, without making a pastime of mock sorrows? With poetry it was rather better. He delighted in the swell and subsidence of the rhythm and the happily recurring rhyme. Nor was Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetry, not perhaps where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and ethereal. It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the awakening spell might lurk, but on raising her eyes from the page to Clifford's face Phoebe would be made aware, by the light breaking through it, that a more delicate intelligence than her own had caught a lambent flame from what she read. One glow of this kind, however, was often the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward, because when the glow left him he seemed conscious of a missing sense and power, and groped about for them as if a blind man should go seeking his lost eyesight. It pleased him more, and was better for his inward welfare, that Phoebe should talk, and make passing occurrences vivid to his mind by her accompanying description and remarks. The life of the garden offered topics enough for such discourse as suited Clifford best. He never failed to inquire what flowers had bloomed since yesterday. His feeling for flowers was very exquisite, and seemed not so much a taste as an emotion. He was fond of sitting with one in his hand, intently observing it, and looking from its petals into Phoebe's face, as if the garden flower were the sister of the household maiden. Not merely was there a delight in the flower's perfume, or pleasure in its beautiful form, and the delicacy or brightness of its hue, but Clifford's enjoyment was accompanied with a perception of life, character, and individuality that made him love these blossoms of the garden as if they were endowed with sentiment and intelligence. This affection and sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a woman's trait. Men, if endowed with it by nature, soon lose, forget, and learn to despise it in their contact with coarser things than flowers. Clifford too had long forgotten it, but found it again now as he slowly revived from the chilled torpor of his life. It is wonderful how many pleasant incidents continually came to pass in that secluded garden spot when once Phoebe had set herself to look for them. She had seen or heard a bee there on the first day of her acquaintance with the place, and often, almost continually indeed, since then, the bees kept coming thither. One knows why, or by what pertinacious desire, for far-fetched sweets, when, no doubt, there were broad clover fields and all kinds of garden growth much nearer home than this. Thither the bees came, however, and plunged into the squash blossoms as if there were no other squash vines within a long day's flight, or as if the soil of Hepsiba's garden gave its productions just the right quality which these laborious little wizards in order to impart the hymenous odor to their whole hive of New England honey. When Clifford heard their sonny, buzzing murmur in the heart of the great yellow blossoms, he looked about him with a joyful sense of warmth and blue sky and green grass, and of God's free air and the whole height from earth to heaven. After all, there need be no question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town, God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford. They brought the rich summer with them, and requital of a little honey. When the bean vines began to flower on the poles, there was one particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom. The daguerreotypist had found these beans in a garret over one of the seven gables, treasured up in an old chest of drawers by some horticultural pinch on of days gone by, who doubtless meant to sow them the next summer, but was himself first sown in Death's garden-ground. By way of testing whether there was still a living germ in such ancient seeds, whole grave had planted some of them, and the result of his experiment was a splendid row of bean vines, clambering early to the full height of the poles, and arraying them, from top to bottom, in a spiral profusion of red blossoms, and ever since the unfolding of the first bud, a multitude of hummingbirds had been attracted thither. At times it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was one of these tiniest fowls of the air, a thumb's bigness of burnished plumage hovering and vibrating about the bean poles. It was with indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight, that Clifford watched the hummingbirds. He used to thrust his head softly out of the arbor to see them the better, all the while too, motioning Phoebe to keep quiet, and snatching glimpses of the smile upon her face, so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy. He had not merely grown young, he was a child again. Hepsiba, whenever she happened to witness one of these fits of miniature enthusiasm, would shake her head, with a strange mingling of the mother and sister, and of pleasure and sadness in her aspect. She said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the hummingbirds came, always from his babyhood, and that his delight in them had been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for beautiful things. And it was a wonderful coincidence, the good lady thought, that the artist should have planted those scarlet-flowering beans which the hummingbirds sought far and wide, and which had not grown in the pinch-on garden before for forty years, on the very summer of Clifford's return. Then would the tears stand in poor Hepsiba's eyes, or overflow them with the two abundant gush, so that she was feigned to betake herself into some corner, lest Clifford should aspire her agitation. Indeed, all the enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears. As late as it did, it was a kind of Indian summer, with a mist in its balmyest sunshine, and decay and death in its gaudiest delight. The more Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child, the sadder was the difference to be recognized. With a mysterious and terrible past, which had annihilated his memory, and a blank future before him, he had only this visionary and impalpable now, which, if he once looked closely at it, is nothing. He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms, laid darkly behind his pleasure, and knew it to be a baby-play which he was to toy and trifle with, instead of thoroughly believing. Clifford saw, it may be, in the mirror of his deeper consciousness, that he was an example and representative of that great class of people whom an inexplicable providence is continually putting at cross-purposes with the world, breaking what seems its own promise in their nature, withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a banquet, and thus, what it might so easily, as one would think, have been adjusted otherwise, making their existence a strangeness, a solitude, and torment. All his life long he had been learning how to be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue, and now, with a lesson thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little airy happiness. Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his eyes. Take my hand, Phoebe, he would say, and pinch it hard with your little fingers. Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, improve myself awake by the sharp touch of pain. Evidently he desired this prick of a trifling anguish in order to assure himself, by that quality which he best knew to be real, that the garden and the seven weather-beaten gables, and Hepsibus' scowl, and Phoebe's smile, were real likewise. Without this signet in his flesh he could have attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit, until even that poor sustenance was exhausted. The author needs great faith in his reader's sympathy, else he must hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so trifling as are essential to make up the idea of this garden life. It was the Eden of a thundersmitten atom, who had fled for refuge thither out of the same dreary, imperilous wilderness into which the original atom was expelled. One of the available means of amusement, of which Phoebe made the most in Clifford's behalf, was that feathered society, the Hens, a breed of whom, as we have already said, was an immemorial heirloom in the Pinchon family. In compliance with the whim of Clifford, as it troubled him to see them in confinement, they had been set at liberty, and now roamed at will about the garden, doing some little mischief, but hindered from escape by buildings on three sides, and the difficult peaks of a wooden fence on the other. They spent much of their abundant leisure on the margin of maw's well, which was haunted by a kind of snail, evidently a titbit to their pallets, and the brackish water itself, however nauseous to the rest of the world, was so greatly esteemed by these fowls that they might be seen tasting, turning up their heads and smacking their bills with precisely the air of wine-bibbers round a probationary cask. They're generally quiet, yet often brisk and constantly diversified talk one to another, or sometimes in soliloquy, as they scratched worms out of the rich black soil, or pecked at such plants as suited their taste. Had such a domestic tone that it was almost a wonder why you could not establish a regular interchange of ideas about household matters, human and galinatious? All hens are well worth studying for the pickwency and rich variety of their manners, but by no possibility can there have been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these ancestral ones. They probably embodied the traditional peculiarities of their whole line of progenitors to writhe through an unbroken succession of eggs, or else this individual Chanticleer and his two wives had grown to be humorists, and a little crack-brained with all, on account of their solitary way of life, and out of sympathy for Hepsiba, their lady patroness. Queer indeed they looked. Chanticleer himself, though stalking on two stilt-like legs, for the dignity of interminable dissent in all his gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge. His two wives were about the size of quails, and as for the one chicken it looked small enough to be still in the egg, and at the same time sufficiently old, withered, whizzened, and experienced, to have been founder of the antiquated race. Instead of being the youngest of the family, it rather seemed to have aggregated into itself the ages, not only of these living specimens of the breed, but of all its forefathers and foremothers, whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed into its little body. Its mother evidently regarded it as the one chicken of the world, and as necessary, in fact, to the world's continuance, or at any rate, to the equilibrium of the present system of affairs, whether in church or state. No lesser sense of the infant fowl's importance could have justified, even in a mother's eyes, the perseverance with which she watched over its safety, ruffling her small person to twice its proper size, and flying in everybody's face that so much as looked towards her hopeful progeny. No lower estimate could have vindicated the indefatigable zeal with which she scratched, and her unscrupulousness in digging up the choicest flower or vegetable for the sake of the fat earthworm at its root. Her nervous cluck, when the chicken happened to be hidden in the long grass, or under the squash-leaves, her gentle croak of satisfaction, while sure of it beneath her wing. Her note of ill-concealed fear and obstreperous defiance, when she saw her arch-enemy, a neighbor's cat, on the top of the high fence, one or other of these sounds was to be heard at almost every moment of the day. By degrees the observer came to feel nearly as much interest in this chicken of illustrious race as the mother hen did. Phoebe, after getting well acquainted with the old hen, was sometimes permitted to take the chicken in her hand, which was quite capable of grasping its cubic inch or two of body. While she curiously examined its hereditary marks, the peculiar speckle of its plumage, the funny tuft on its head, and a knob on each of its legs, the little biped, as she insisted, kept giving her a sagacious wink. The daguerre typist once whispered her that these marks betoken the oddities of the Pinchon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life of the old house, embodying its interpretation likewise, though an unintelligible one, as such clues generally are. It was a feathered riddle, a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if the egg had been idle. The second of Chanticleer's two wives, ever since Phoebe's arrival, had been in a state of heavy despondency, caused as it afterwards appeared by her inability to lay an egg. One day, however, by her self-important gait, the sideways turn of her head, and the cock of her eye, as she pried into one and another nook of the garden, croaking to herself all the while with inexpressible complacency. It was made evident that this identical hen, much as mankind undervalued her, carried something about her person, the worth of which was not to be estimated either in gold or precious stones. Shortly after, there was a prodigious cackling and congratulation of Chanticleer and all his family, including the wizened chicken, who appeared to understand the matter quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt. That afternoon Phoebe saw a diminutive egg. Not in the regular nest it was far too precious to be trusted there, but cunningly hidden under the current pushes, on some dry stalks of last year's grass. Hepsiba, on learning the fact, took possession of the egg and appropriated it to Clifford's breakfast, on account of a certain delicacy of flavor, for which, as she affirmed, these eggs had always been famous. Thus unscrupulously did the old gentlewoman sacrifice the continuance, perhaps, of an ancient feathered race, with no better end than to supply her brother with a dainty that hardly filled the bowl of a teaspoon. It must have been in reference to this outrage that Chanticleer, the next day, accompanied by the bereaved mother of the egg, took his post in front of Phoebe and Clifford, and delivered himself of a harangue that might have proved as long as his own pedigree, but for a fit of merriment on Phoebe's part. Hereupon the offended vows stalked away on his long stilts, and utterly withdrew his notice from Phoebe and the rest of human nature, until she made her peace with an offering of spice-cake, which, next to snails, was the delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste. We linger too long, no doubt, beside this paltry rivulet of life that flowed through the garden of the Pinchon House. But we deem it pardonable to record these mean incidents in poor delights, because they proved so greatly to Clifford's benefit. They had the earth's smell in them, and contributed to give him health and substance. Some of his occupations wrought less desirably upon him. He had a singular propensity, for example, to hang over malls well, and look at the constantly shifting fantasmagoria of figures produced by the agitation of the water over the mosaic work of colored pebbles at the bottom. He said that faces looked upward to him there, beautiful faces, arrayed in bewitching smiles. Each momentary face so fair and rosy, and every smile so sunny, that he felt wronged at its departure, until the same flitting witchcraft made a new one. But sometimes he would suddenly cry out, The dark face gazes at me, and be miserable the whole day afterwards. Phoebe, when she hung over the fountain by Clifford's side, could see nothing of all this. Neither the beauty nor the ugliness, but only the colored pebbles, looking as if the gush of the waters shook and disarranged them. And the dark face, that so troubled Clifford, was no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of the damson trees, and breaking the inner light of malls well. The truth was, however, that his fancy, reviving faster than his will and judgment, and always stronger than they, created shapes of loveliness that were symbolic of his native character, and now and then a stern and dreadful shape that typified his fate. On Sundays, after Phoebe had been at church, for the girl had a church going conscience, and would hardly have been at ease had she missed either prayer, singing, sermon, or benediction. After church time, therefore, there was, ordinarily, a sober little festival in the garden. In addition to Clifford, Hepsiba, and Phoebe, two guests made up the company. One was the artist Holgrave, who, in spite of his consociation with reformers, and his other queer and questionable traits, continued to hold an elevated place in Hepsiba's regard. The other, we are almost ashamed to say, was the venerable Uncle Venner in a clean shirt and a broad cloth coat, more respectable than his ordinary wear, in as much as it was neatly patched on each elbow, and might be called an entire garment, except for a slight inequality in the length of its skirts. Clifford, on several occasions, had seemed to enjoy the old man's intercourse, for the sake of his mellow, cheerful vein, which was like the sweet flavor of a frost-bitten apple, such as one picks up under the tree in December. A man at the very lowest point of the social scale was easier and more agreeable for the fallen gentleman to encounter than a person at any of the intermediate degrees. And moreover, as Clifford's young manhood had been lost, he was fond of feeling himself comparatively youthful, now, in opposition with the patriarchal age of Uncle Venner. In fact, it was sometimes observable that Clifford half-willfully hid from himself the consciousness of being stricken in years, and cherished visions of an earthly future still before him. Visions, however, too indistinctly drawn to be followed by disappointment, though doubtless by depression, when any casual incident or recollection made him sensible of the withered leaf. So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the ruinous arbor, Hepsiba, stately as ever at heart, and yielding not an inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as justifying a princess-like condescension, exhibited a not ungraceful hospitality. She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage-council, lady as she was, with the wood-sawyer, the messenger of everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher. An Uncle Venner, who had studied the world at street corners and the other post equally well-adapted for just observation, was as ready to give out his wisdom as a town-pump to give water. "'Mirs Hepsiba, ma'am,' said he once, after they had all been cheerful together, "'I really enjoy these quiet little meetings of a sabbath afternoon. They're very much like what I expect to have after I retire to my farm.' "'Uncle Venner,' observed Clifford in a drowsy, inward tone, "'he's always talking about his farm. But I have a better scheme for him by and by. We shall see.' "'Ah, Mr. Clifford Pinchon,' said the man of patches, "'you may scheme for me as much as you please, but I'm not going to give up this one scheme of my own, even if I never bring it really to pass. It does seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up property upon property. If I had done so, I should feel as if Providence were not bound to take care of me. And at all events, the city wouldn't be. I'm one of those people who think that infinity is big enough for us all, and eternity long enough.' "'Why so they are, Uncle Venner?' remarked Phoebe after a pause, for she had been trying to fathom the profundity and appositeness of this concluding apathogen. But for this short life of ours, one would like a house and a moderate garden-spot of one's own.' "'It appears to me,' said the daguerre typist, smiling, that Uncle Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom. Only they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the systematizing Frenchman.' "'Come, Phoebe,' said Hepsiba, it is time to bring the currents.' And then, while the yellow richness of the declining sunshine still fell into the open space of the garden, Phoebe brought out a loaf of bread and a china bowl of currants, freshly gathered from the bushes, and crushed with sugar. These with water, but not from the fountain of ill omen close at hand, constituted all the entertainment. Meanwhile, Holgrave took some pains to establish an intercourse with Clifford, actuated, it might seem, entirely by an impulse of kindness in order that the present hour might be cheerfuler than most which the poor recluse had spent, or was destined yet to spend. Nevertheless, in the artist's deep, thoughtful, all-observant eyes, there was now and then an expression not sinister, but questionable, as if he had some other interest in the scene than a stranger a youthful and unconnected adventurer might be supposed to have. With great mobility of outward mood, however, he applied himself to the task of enlivening the party, and with so much success that even dark-hued Hepsiba threw off one tint of melancholy and made what shift she could with the remaining portion. Phoebe said to herself, How pleasant he can be! As for Uncle Venner, as a mark of friendship and approbation, he readily consented to afford the young man his countenance in the way of his profession. Not metaphorically, be it understood, but literally, by allowing a daguerreotype of his face, so familiar to the town, to be exhibited at the entrance of Holgrave's studio. Clifford, as the company partook of their little banquet, grew to be the gayest of them all. Either it was one of those upquivering flashes of the spirit, to which minds in an abnormal state are liable, or else the artist had subtly touched some chord that made musical vibration. Indeed, what with the pleasant summer evening, and the sympathy of this little circle of not unkindly souls, it was perhaps natural that a character so susceptible, as Clifford's, should become animated, and show itself readily responsive to what was said around him. But he gave out his own thoughts likewise, with an airy and fanciful glow, so that they glistened, as it were, through the arbor, and made their escape among the interstices of the foliage. He had been as cheerful, no doubt, while alone with Phoebe, but never with such tokens of acute, though partial, intelligence. But as the sunlight left the peaks of the seven gables, so did the excitement fade out of Clifford's eyes. He gazed vaguely and mournfully about him, as if he missed something precious, and missed it the more drearily for not knowing precisely what it was. I want my happiness! At last he murmured, hoarsely and indistinctly, hardly shaping out the words. Many, many years have I waited for it! It is late! It is late! I want my happiness! Alas, poor Clifford, you are old, and worn with troubles that ought never to have befallen you. You are partly crazy and partly imbecile, a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is, though some in less degree or less perceptibly than their fellows. Fade has no happiness in store for you, unless you're quiet home in the old family residence with the faithful Hepsuba, and your long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the Degarotypist deserve to be called happiness. Why not? If not the thing itself, it is marvelously like it, and the more so for that ethereal and intangible quality which causes it all to vanished it too close an introspection. Take it, therefore, while you may. Mermor not, question not, but make the most of it. CHAPTER XI. From the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character of his ordinary mood, Clifford would perhaps have been content to spend one day after another interminably, or at least throughout the summertime, in just the kind of life described in the preceding pages. Fancying, however, that it might be for his benefit occasionally to diversify the scene, Phoebe sometimes suggested that he should look out upon the life of the street. For this purpose, they used to mount the staircase together to the second story of the house, where, at the termination of a wide entry, there was an arched window of uncommonly large dimensions, shaded by a pair of curtains. It opened above the porch, where there had formerly been a balcony, the balustrade of which had long since gone to decay and been removed. At this arched window, throwing it open, but keeping himself in comparative obscurity by means of the curtain, Clifford had an opportunity of witnessing such a portion of the great world's movement as might be supposed to roll through one of the retired streets of a not very populous city. But he and Phoebe made his sight as well worth seeing as any that the city could exhibit. The pale gray, childish, aged melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson of the curtain, watching the monotony of everyday occurrences with a kind of inconsequential interest in earnestness, and at every petty throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the bright young girl. If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pingeon Street would hardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along its extent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye and titillate, if not engross, his observation. Things familiar to the youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange to him. A cab, an omnibus with its populous interior, dropping here and there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying that vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere and nowhere, these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, but forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled along their track. As regarded novelties, among which cabs and omnibuses were to be reckoned, his mind appeared to have lost his proper gripe and retentiveness. Twice or thrice, for example, during the sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the Pingeon House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth instead of the white dust that had risen at a lady's lightest footfall. It was like a summer shower which the city authorities had caught entamed, and compelled it into the commonest routine of their convenience. With the water-cart Clifford could never grow familiar. It always affected him with just the same surprise as it first. His mind took an apparently sharp impression from it, but lost the recollection of this perambulatory shower before its next reappearance, as completely as did the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed white dust again. It was the same with the railroad. Clifford could hear the obstreperous howl of the steam-devil, and, by leaning a little away from the arched window, could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street. The idea of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence, and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much surprise, the hundredth time as the first. Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment. It can merely be a suspended animation, for, were the power actually to perish, there would be little use of immortality. We are less than ghosts, for the time being, whenever this calamity befalls us. Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives. All the antique fashions of the street were dear to him, even such as were characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his fastidious senses. He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, the former track of which he still found in his long-buried remembrance, as the observer of today finds the wheel-tracks of ancient vehicles in Herculaneum. The butcher's cart, with its snowy canopy, was an acceptable object, so was the fish cart, heralded by its horn. So likewise was the countryman's cart of vegetables, plotting from door to door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a trade in turnips, carrots, summer squashes, string beans, green peas, and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighborhood. The baker's cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect on Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the very dissonance of yore. One afternoon a scissor grinder chanced to set his wheel a-going under the pinch on Elm, and just in front of the arched window. Children came running with their mother's scissors, or the carving knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an edge, except indeed poor Clifford's wits, that the grinder might apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new. Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by the scissor grinder's foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hard stone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss, as fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compiers in pandemonium, though squeezed into smaller compass. It was an ugly, little venomous serpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears. But Clifford listened with rapturous delight. The sound, however disagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and together with the circle of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared to give him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sun-shiny existence than he had attained in almost any other way. Nevertheless, its charm lay chiefly in the past, for the scissor grinder's wheel had hissed in his childish ear. He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stage coaches nowadays, and he asked in an injured tone what it become of all those old square-topped shesses, with wings sticking out on either side, that used to be drawn by a plow-horse, and driven by a farmer's wife and daughter, peddling wortelberries and blackberries about the town. Their disappearance made him doubt, he said, whether the berries had not left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady country lanes. But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty, and however humble away, did not require to be recommended by these old associations. This was observable when one of those Italian boys, who are rather a modern feature of our streets, came along with his barrel organ, and stopped under the wide and cool shadows of the elm. With his quick professional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the arched window, and, opening his instrument, began to scatter its melodies abroad. He had a monkey on his shoulder, dressed in a highland plaid, and to complete the sum of splendid attractions wherewith he presented himself to the public. There was a company of little figures, whose fear and habitation was in the mahogany case of his organ, and whose principle of life was the music which the Italian made at his business to grind out. In all their variety of occupation, the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with her fan, the topper with his bottle, the milkmaid sitting by her cow, this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a harmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance. The Italian turned to crank, and behold, every one of these small individuals started into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler wrought upon a shoe, the blacksmith hammered his iron, the soldier waved his glittering blade, the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan, the jolly topper swigged lustily at his bottle, a scholar opened his book with eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro along the page. The milkmaid energetically drained her cow, and a miser counted gold into his strongbox, all at the same turning of a crank. Yes, and moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on her lips. Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our business or amusement, however serious, however trifling, all danced to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bringing nothing finally to pass. For the most remarkable aspect of the affair was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was the cobbler's shoe finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out, nor was there a drop less of brandy in the topper's bottle, nor a drop more of milk in the milkmaid's tail, nor one additional coin in the miser's strongbox, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to become wise. Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier for the maiden's granted kiss. But, rather than swallow this last two-acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show. The monkey, meanwhile, with thick-tail curling out into preposterous prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian's feet. He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every passer-by, and to the circle of children that soon gathered round, and to Hepsiba's shop door, and upward to the arched window, whence Phoebe and Clifford were looking down. Every moment also he took off his highland bonnet, and performed a bow and scrape. Sometimes moreover he made personal application to individuals, holding out his small black palm, and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire for whatever filthy lucre might happen to be in anybody's pocket. The mean and low, yet strangely men-like expression of his wilted countenance, the prying and crafty glance that showed him ready to gripe at every miserable advantage, his enormous tail, too enormous to be decently concealed under his gabardine, and the deviltry of nature which it betokened. Take this monkey just as he was, in short, and you could desire no better image of the memmon of copper coin, symbolizing the grossest form of the love of money. Whether was there any possibility of satisfying the covetous little devil, Phoebe threw down a whole handful of scents, which he picked up with joyless eagerness, handed them over to the Italian for safekeeping, and immediately recommenced a series of pantomimic petitions for more. Doubtless more than one New Englander, or let him be of what country he might, it is as likely to be the case, passed by and threw a look at the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral condition was here exemplified. Clifford, however, was a being of another order. He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled, too, at the figures which it set in motion. But after looking a while at the long-tailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness, spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears, a weakness which men of merely delicate endowments, and destitute of the fiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter, can hardly avoid when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to them. Pinchon Street was sometimes enliven by spectacles of more imposing pretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with them. With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with the world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him. This was made evident one day, when a political procession, with hundreds of flaunting banners, and drums, fives, clarions, and symbols, reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town, and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and most infrequent uproar, past the ordinarily quiet house of the Seven Gables. As mere object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectator feels it to be fool's play, when he can distinguish the tedious commonplace of each man's visage with the perspiration in weary self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the stiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back of his black coat. In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the center of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city. For then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities of which it is made up, into one broad mass of existence, one great life, one collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating it. But on the other hand, if an impressable person, standing alone over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in its atoms, but in its aggregate, as a mighty river of life, massive in its tide and black with mystery, and out of its depths, calling to the kindred depth within him, then the contiguity would add to the effect. It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies. So it proved with Clifford. He shuddered. He grew pale. He threw an appealing look at Hepsiba and Phoebe who were with him at the window. They comprehended nothing of his emotions, and supposed him merely disturbed by the unaccustomed tumult. At last, with tremulous limbs, he started up, set his foot on the windowsill, and in an instant more he would have been in the unguarded balcony. As it was, the whole procession might have seen him, a wild, haggard deer, his gray locks floating in the wind that waved their banners, lonely being, estranged from his race, but now feeling himself man again by virtue of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him. Had Clifford attained the balcony, he would probably have leaped into the street, but weather impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges its victim over the very precipice which he shrinks from, or by a natural magnetism tending towards the great center of humanity, it were not easy to decide. Both impulses might have wrought on him at once. But his companions, affrighted by his gesture, which was that of a man hurried away in spite of himself, seized Clifford's garment and held him back. Hepsiba shrieked. Phoebe, to whom all extravagance was a horror, burst into sobs and tears. Clifford! Clifford! Are you crazy? cried his sister. I hardly know, Hepsiba, said Clifford, drawing a long breath. Fear nothing. It is over now. But had I taken that plunge and survived it, me thinks it would have made me another man. Possibly in some sense Clifford may have been right. He needed a shock, or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the ocean of human life and to sink down and be covered by its profoundness, and then to emerge sobered, invigorated, restored to the world and to himself. Perhaps again he required nothing less than the great final remedy, death. A similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with his kind sometimes showed itself in a milder form, and once it was made beautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself. In the incident now to be sketched there was a touching recognition on Clifford's part of God's care and love towards him, towards this poor, forsaken man, who, if any mortal could, might have been pardoned for regarding himself as thrown aside, forgotten, and left to be the sport of some fiend whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief. It was the Sabbath morning, one of those bright, calm Sabbaths, with its own hallowed atmosphere, when heaven seems to diffuse itself over the earth's face in the solemn smile no less sweet than solemn. On such a Sabbath morning, where we pure enough to be its medium, we should be conscious of the earth's natural worship ascending through our frames on whatever spot of ground we stood. The church bells, with various tones, but all in harmony, were calling out and responding to one another. It is the Sabbath, the Sabbath, yea, the Sabbath! And over the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds, now slowly, now with livelier joy. Now one bell alone, now all the bells together, crying earnestly, It is the Sabbath! And flinging their accents afar off, to meld into the air and pervaded with the holy word. The air, with God's sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it, was meat for mankind to breathe into their hearts, and send it forth again as the utterance of prayer. Clifford sat at the window with Hepsiba, watching the neighbors as they stepped into the street. All of them, however unspiritual on other days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence, so that their very garments, whether it were an old man's decent coat well brushed for the thousandth time, or little boy's first sack and trousers finished yesterday by his mother's needle, had somewhat of the quality of ascension robes. Both likewise, from the portal of the old house, stepped Phoebe, putting up her small green sunshade, and throwing upward a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at the arched window. In her aspect there was a familiar gladness, and a holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as ever. She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's mother tongue. Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in her apparel, as if nothing that she wore, neither her gown nor her small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy stockings, had ever been put on before, or if worn were all the fresher for it, and with the fragrances if they had lain among the rose buds. The girl waved her hand to Hepsiba and Clifford, and went up the street, a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven. Hepsiba asked Clifford, after watching Phoebe to the corner, Do you never go to church? No, Clifford, she replied, Not these many, many years. Were I to be there? he rejoined. It seems to me that I could pray once more, when so many human souls were praying all around me. She looked into Clifford's face, and beheld there a soft natural effusion, for his heart gushed out, as it were, and ran over at his eyes in delightful reverence for God, and kindly affection for his human brethren. The emotion communicated itself to Hepsiba. She yearned to take him by the hand, and go and kneel down. They two together, both so long separate from the world. And as she now recognized, scarcely friends with him above, to kneel down among the people, and be reconciled to God and man at once. Dear brother, said she earnestly, Let us go! We belong nowhere. We have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon. But let us go to some place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle. Poor and forsaken as we are, some pew-door will be opened to us. So Hepsiba and her brother made themselves ready, as ready as they could in the best of their old-fashioned garments, which had hung on pegs, or been laid away in trunks, so long that the dampness and moldy smell of the past was on them. Made themselves ready, in their fated bettermost, to go to church. They descended the staircase together, gaunt, sallow, Hepsiba, and pale, emaciated, age-stricken Clifford. They pulled open the front door, and stepped across the threshold, and felt both of them, as if they were standing in the presence of the whole world, and with mankind's great and terrible eye on them alone. The eye of their fathers seemed to be withdrawn, and gave them no encouragement. The warm sunny air of the street made them shiver. Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one step farther. It cannot be, Hepsiba. It is too late, said Clifford with deep sadness. We are ghosts. We have no right among human beings, no right anywhere but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and which, therefore, we are doomed to haunt. And besides, he continued with a fastidious sensibility, inalienably characteristic of the man, it would not be fit nor beautiful to go. It is an ugly thought that I should be frightful to my fellow-beings, and the children would cling to their mother's gowns at sight of me. They shrank back into the dusky passageway, and closed the door. But going up the staircase again, they found the whole interior of the house tenfold more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for the glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched. They could not flee, their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stood behind it to watch them stealing out. At the threshold they felt his pitiless gripe upon them. For what other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart? What jailer so inexorable as one's self? But it would be no fair picture of Clifford's state of mind where we do represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched. On the contrary, there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, of so much as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless moments as himself. He had no burden of care upon him. There were none of those questions and contingencies with a future to be settled which wear away all other lives, and render them not worth having by the very process of providing for their support. In this respect he was a child, a child for the whole term of his existence, be it long or short. His life seemed to be standing still at a period little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences about that epic, just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the sufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably behind the accident that stupefied him. He sometimes told Phoebe and Hepsiba his dreams, in which he invariably played the part of a child, or a very young man. So vivid were they, in his relation of them, that he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or print of a chintz morning dress which he had seen their mother wear, in the dream of the preceding night. Hepsiba, peaking herself on a woman's accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different from what Clifford described, but producing the very gown from an old trunk, it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it. Had Clifford, every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike, undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and broken man, the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much to bear. It would have caused an acute agony to thrill from the morning twilight all the day through until bedtime, and even then would have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain and pallid hue of misfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber. But the nightly moonshine interwoven itself with the morning mist, and enveloped him as in a robe which he hugged about his person, and seldom let realities pierce through. He was not often quite awake, but slept open-eyed, and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then. Thus lingering always so near his childhood, he had sympathies with children and kept his heart the fresher thereby, like a reservoir into which rivulets were pouring not far from the fountain-head. Though prevented by a subtle sense of propriety, from desiring to associate with them, he loved few things better than to look out of the arched window and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk, or schoolboys at a game of ball. Their voices also were very pleasant to him, heard at a distance, all swarming and intermingling together as flies do in a sunny room. Clifford Wood doubtless had been glad to share their sports. One afternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow soap bubbles, an amusement, as Hepsiba told Phoebe, apart, that had been a favorite one with her brother when they were both children. Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in his mouth. Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over his countenance, were still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had survived so long. Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad from the window into the street. Little impalpable worlds were those soap bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, on the nothing of their surface. It was curious to see how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies as they came floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them. Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps carried a pleasant recollection of the bubbles onward as far as the street corner. Some looked angrily upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty afloat so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingers or their walking sticks to touch with all, and were perversely gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and sky seen, vanished as if it had never been. At last, just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presence happened to be passing, a large bubble sailed majestically down, and burst right against his nose. He looked up, at first with a stern, keen glance, which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the arched window, then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing a dog-day sultriness for the space of several yards about him. Ah-ha! Cousin Clifford! cried Judge Pinshaw. What! Still blowing soap bubbles? The tone seemed as if he meant to be kind and soothing, but yet had a bitterness of sarcasm in it. As for Clifford, an absolute palsy of fear came over him. Apart from any definite cause of dread which his past experience might have given him, he felt that native and original horror of the excellent Judge, which is proper to a weak, delicate, and apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength. Cliff is incomprehensible by weakness, and therefore the more terrible. There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle of his own connections.