In leaving the duties of his office he considered himself, as he said a
little despondently, like an old horse unharnessed and turned out to
pasture. He felt that he had separated himself from human interests, and
was henceforth to live in his books with the dead, until he should be
numbered with them himself. He had chosen this quiet village as a place
where he might pass his days undisturbed, and find a peaceful
resting-place in its churchyard, where the gravel was dry, and the sun
lay warm, and the glowing woods of autumn would spread their many-colored
counterpane over the bed where he would be taking his rest. It sometimes
came over him painfully that he was never more to be of any importance to
his fellow-creatures. There was nobody living to whom he was connected
by any very near ties. He felt kindly enough to the good woman in whose
house he lived; he sometimes gave a few words of counsel to her son; he
was not unamiable with the few people he met; he bowed with great
consideration to the Rev. Dr. Pemberton; and he studied with no small
interest the physiognomy of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, to whose
sermons he listened, with a black scowl now and then, and a nostril
dilating with ominous intensity of meaning. But he said sadly to
himself, that his life had been a failure,--that he had nothing to show
for it, and his one talent was ready in its napkin to give back to his
Lord.

He owed something of this sadness, perhaps, to a cause which many would
hold of small significance. Though he had mourned for no lost love, at
least so far as was known, though he had never suffered the pang of
parting with a child, though he seemed isolated from those joys and
griefs which come with the ties of family, he too had his private urn
filled with the ashes of extinguished hopes. He was the father of a dead
book.