loses and in what it retains.


One Sunday forenoon, when it was not too cold for the young folks to
be swinging on that gate which has been mentioned, and the elders were
in-doors, enjoying the holiday in their own way, we descried an old
gentleman approaching up the winding street. As he drew nearer he
presented rather a shabby, or, at least, rusty appearance. His felt
hat was not so black as it had been; his coat was creased and soiled;
his boots needed a blacking. He swung a cane as he stumped along, and
there was a sort of faded smartness in his bearing and a knowingness
in his grim old visage, indicating some incongruous familiarity with
the manners of the great world. He came to a halt in front of the
house, and, after quizzing it for a moment, went up the steps and beat
a fashionable tattoo with the knocker.

Summoned in-doors soon afterwards, we found this questionable
personage sitting in the drawing-room. His voice was husky, but
modulated to the inflections of polite breeding; he used a good many
small gestures, and grinned often, revealing the yellow remains of his
ancient teeth; he laughed, too, with a hoarse sound in his throat.
There was about him an air of determined cheerfulness and affability,
though between the efforts the light died down in his wrinkled old
eyes and the lines of his face sagged and deepened. He offered to kiss
my sisters, but they drew back; he took my hand in his own large, dry
one with its ragged nails and swollen joints. At length he inveigled
my younger sister to his knee, where she sat gazing unflinchingly and
solemnly into him with that persistence which characterizes little
girls of four or five who are not quite sure of their ground. Her
smooth, pink-and-white cheeks and unwinking eyes contrasted vividly