My life glided on, the past appearing to mingle with the present and
absorb the future, till the whole lies before me at a glance. My
manhood has long been waning with a stanch decay; my earlier
contemporaries, after lives of unbroken health, are all at rest,
without having known the weariness of later age; and now, with a
wrinkled forehead and thin white hair as badges of my dignity, I have
become the patriarch, the Uncle of the village. I love that name; it
widens the circle of my sympathies; it joins all the youthful to my
household, in the kindred of affection.

Like Uncle Parker, whose rheumatic bones were dashed against Egg Rock,
full forty years ago, I am a spinner of long yarns. Seated on the
gunwale of a dory, or on the sunny side of a boat-house, where the
warmth is grateful to my limbs, or by my own hearth, when a friend or
two are there, I overflow with talk, and yet am never tedious. With a
broken voice I give utterance to much wisdom. Such, Heaven be
praised! is the vigor of my faculties, that many a forgotten usage,
and traditions ancient in my youth, and early adventures of myself or
others, hitherto effaced by things more recent, acquire new
distinctness in my memory. I remember the happy days when the haddock
were more numerous on all the fishing-grounds than sculpins in the
surf; when the deepwater cod swain close in shore, and the dogfish,
with his poisonous horn, had not learned to take the hook. I can
number every equinoctial storm, in which the sea has overwhelmed the
street, flooded the cellars of the village, and hissed upon our
kitchen hearth. I give the history of the great whale that was landed
on Whale Beach, and whose jaws, being now my gateway, will last for
ages after my coffin shall have passed beneath them. Thence it is an
easy digression to the halibut, scarcely smaller than the whale, which
ran out six cod-lines, and hauled my dory to the mouth of Boston