a senile as well as a juvenile condition; his venerable head, thatched
with such imperceptible hair that, at a distance, it looks like a mild
aureola, and his imperfect dental exhibition. But beside these physical
peculiarities may be observed certain moral symptoms, which go to
disprove his assumed youth. He is in the habit of falling into
reveries, caused, I have no doubt, by some circumstance which suggests
a comparison with his experience in his remoter boyhood, or by some
serious retrospection of the past years. He has been detected lying
awake, at times when he should have been asleep, engaged in curiously
comparing the bed-clothes, walls, and furniture with some recollection
of his youth. At such moments he has been heard to sing softly to
himself fragments of some unintelligible composition, which probably
still linger in his memory as the echoes of a music he has long
outgrown. He has the habit of receiving strangers with the familiarity
of one who had met them before, and to whom their antecedents and
peculiarities were matters of old acquaintance, and so unerring is
his judgment of their previous character that when he withholds his
confidence I am apt to withhold mine. It is somewhat remarkable that
while the maturity of his years and the respect due to them is denied by
man, his superiority and venerable age is never questioned by the brute
creation. The dog treats him with a respect and consideration accorded
to none others, and the cat permits a familiarity which I should shudder
to attempt. It may be considered an evidence of some Pantheistic quality
in his previous education, that he seems to recognize a fellowship even
in inarticulate objects; he has been known to verbally address plants,
flowers, and fruit, and to extend his confidence to such inanimate
objects as chairs and tables. There can be little doubt that, in the
remote period of his youth, these objects were endowed with not only
sentient natures, but moral capabilities, and he is still in the habit
of beating them when they collide with him, and of pardoning them with a