or his one
colossal weakness, the town might have condemned him, in good old
Athenian fashion. Clock-mending was a legitimate industry; but there
were those who felt it to be, in his case, a mere pretext for nosing
round and identifying ridiculous old things which nobody prized until
Nicholas Oldfield told them it was conformable so to do. Some believed
him and some did not; but it was known that a MacDonough's Victory
tea-set drove him to an almost outspoken rapture, and that the mere
mention of the Bay Psalm Book (a copy of which he sought with the
haggard fervor of one who worships but has ceased to hope) was enough
to make him "wild as a hawk." Old papers, too, drew him by their very
mildew; and when his townsfolk were in danger of respecting him too
tediously, they recalled these amiable puerilities, drew a breath of
relief, and marked his value down.

Many facts in his life were not in the least understood, because he
never saw the possibility of talking about them. For example, when at
the marriage of his son, Young Nick, he made over the farm, and kept his
own residence in the little gambrel-roofed house where he had been born,
and his father and grandfather before him, the act was, for a time,
regarded somewhat gloomily by the public at large. There were Young Nick
and his Hattie, living in the big new house, with its spacious piazza
and cool green blinds; there the two daughters were born and bred, and
the elder of them was married. The new house had its hired girl and man;
and meantime the other Nicholas (nobody ever dreamed of calling him Old
Nick) was cooking his own meals, and even, of a Saturday, scouring his
kitchen floor. It was easy to see in him the pathetic symbol of a bygone
generation relegated to the past. A little wave of sympathy crept to his
very feet, and then, finding itself unnoted, ebbed away again. Only one
village censor dared speak, saying slyly to Young Nick's Hattie:--

"Ain't no room for grandpa in the new house, is there?"

Hattie opened her eyes wide at this discovery, though now she realized
that echoes of a like benevolence had reached her ears before. She went
home very early from the quilting, and that night she said to her
husband, as they sat on the doorstone, waiting for the milk to cool:--

"Nicholas, little things I've got hold of, first an' last, make me
conclude folks pity father. Do you s'pose they do?"

Young Nick selected a fat plantain spike, and began stripping t