smiling, communicates the accidents and reads the lesson of his
long career. Opinions are strengthened, indeed, but they are also
weeded out in the course of years. What remains steadily present
to the eye of the retired veteran in his hermitage, what still
ministers to his content, what still quickens his old honest heart
- these are "the real long-lived things" that Whitman tells us to
prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where they differ, wisdom
lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his heart to beat in
tune with his gray-bearded teacher's that a lesson may be learned.
I have known one old gentleman, whom I may name, for he in now
gathered to his stock - Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton, and
author of an excellent law-book still re-edited and republished.
Whether he was originally big or little is more than I can guess.
When I knew him he was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and
shrunken; buckled into a stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by
ailments, which kept him hobbling in and out of the room; one foot
gouty; a wig for decency, not for deception, on his head; close
shaved, except under his chin - and for that he never failed to
apologise, for it went sore against the traditions of his life.
You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by Miss Mather; yet
this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year in the
plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming with human kindness,
and staunch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities. You
could not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat
Shakespeare and Webster and Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page
together; but the parchment was filled up, there was no room for
fresh inscriptions, and he was capable of repeating the same
anecdote on many successive visits. His voice survived in its full
power, and he took a pride in using it. On his last voyage as
Commissioner of lighthouses, he hailed a ship at sea and made