them, beside his Bessie, who doubtless would recognize her youthful
companion in spite of his ugly garniture of decay. He longed to be gazed
at by the loving eyes now closed; he shrank from the hard stare of them
that loved him not. Walking the streets seldom and reluctantly, he felt a
dreary impulse to elude the people's observation, as if with a sense that
he had gone irrevocably out of fashion, and broken his connecting links
with the net-work of human life; or else it was that nightmare-feeling
which we sometimes have in dreams, when we seem to find ourselves
wandering through a crowded avenue, with the noonday sun upon us, in some
wild extravagance of dress or nudity. He was conscious of estrangement
from his towns-people, but did not always know how nor wherefore, nor why
he should be thus groping through the twilight mist in solitude. If they
spoke loudly to him, with cheery voices, the greeting translated itself
faintly and mournfully to his ears; if they shook him by the hand, it was
as if a thick, insensible glove absorbed the kindly pressure and the
warmth. When little Pansie was the companion of his walk, her childish
gayety and freedom did not avail to bring him into closer relationship
with men, but seemed to follow him into that region of indefinable
remoteness, that dismal Fairy-Land of aged fancy, into which old Grandsir
Dolliver had so strangely crept away.

Yet there were moments, as many persons had noticed, when the great-
grandpapa would suddenly take stronger hues of life. It was as if his
faded figure had been colored over anew, or at least, as he and Pansie
moved along the street, as if a sunbeam had fallen across him, instead of
the gray gloom of an instant before. His chilled sensibilities had
probably been touched and quickened by the warm contiguity of his little
companion through the medium of her hand, as it stirred within his own, or
some inflection of her voice that set his memory ringing and chiming with
forgotten sounds. While that music lasted, the old man was alive and