discovered fine prospects (so no graveyard be in the background),
and also after Sweden-borganism, and the Spirit Rapping
philosophy, with other new views, alike in things natural and
unnatural; and immortally hopeful, is forever making new
flower-beds even on the north side of the house where the bleak
mountain wind would scarce allow the wiry weed called hard-hack
to gain a thorough footing; and on the road-side sets out mere
pipe-stems of young elms; though there is no hope of any shade
from them, except over the ruins of her great granddaughter's
gravestones; and won't wear caps, but plaits her gray hair; and
takes the Ladies' Magazine for the fashions; and always buys her
new almanac a month before the new year; and rises at dawn; and
to the warmest sunset turns a cold shoulder; and still goes on at
odd hours with her new course of history, and her French, and her
music; and likes a young company; and offers to ride young colts;
and sets out young suckers in the orchard; and has a spite
against my elbowed old grape-vine, and my club-footed old
neighbor, and my claw-footed old chair, and above all, high above
all, would fain persecute, until death, my high-mantled old
chimney. By what perverse magic, I a thousand times think, does
such a very autumnal old lady have such a very vernal young soul?
When I would remonstrate at times, she spins round on me with,
"Oh, don't you grumble, old man (she always calls me old man),
it's I, young I, that keep you from stagnating." Well, I suppose
it is so. Yea, after all, these things are well ordered. My wife,
as one of her poor relations, good soul, intimates, is the salt
of the earth, and none the less the salt of my sea, which
otherwise were unwholesome. She is its monsoon, too, blowing a
brisk gale over it, in the one steady direction of my chimney.