mainly in mahogany, linen, and hams; to the other it brought too much
sadness to be welcomed, for it seemed, like the sunlight, to issue from
the grave of his vanished youth. He was not by nature a sad man; he was
only one that had found the past more delightful than the present, and
had not left his first loves.

The twilight of his years had crept upon him and was deepening; and he
felt his youth slowly withering under their fallen leaves. With more
education, and perhaps more receptivity than most farmers, he had
married a woman he fervently loved, whose rarely truthful nature, to
which she had striven to keep true, had developed the delicate flower of
moral and social refinement; and her influence upon him had been of the
eternal sort. While many of their neighbors were vying with each other
in the effort to dress, and dwell, and live up to their notion of
_gentility_, Richard Colman and his wife had never troubled themselves
about fashion, but had sought to please each the taste of the other, and
cultivate their own. Perhaps now as he sat thus silent in the _dimmits_,
he was holding closer converse than he knew, or any of us can know, with
one who seemed to have vanished from all this side of things, except the
heart of her husband. That clung to what people would call _her memory_;
I prefer to call it _her_.

The rose-scented hush was torn by the strident, cicala-like shrilling of
a self-confident, self-satisfied female voice--

"Richard, that son of yours will come to no good! You may take my word
for it!"

Mr. Colman made no answer; the dusky, sweet-smelling waves of the
silence closed over its laceration.