ady carefully down the plank. That young lady was afterwards my
grandmother Titbottom.

"And so, over the gleaming sea which he had watched so long, and which
seemed thus to reward his patient gaze, came his bride that sunny
morning.

"'Of course we are happy,' he used to say: 'For you are the gift of
the sun I have loved so long and so well.' And my grandfather
Titbottom would lay his hand so tenderly upon the golden hair of his
young bride, that you could fancy him a devout Parsee caressing
sunbeams.

"There were endless festivities upon occasion of the marriage; and my
grandfather did not go to one of them in his dressing-gown. The gentle
sweetness of his wife melted every heart into love and sympathy. He
was much older than she, without doubt. But age, as he used to say
with a smile of immortal youth, is a matter of feeling, not of years.
And if, sometimes, as she sat by his side upon the piazza, her fancy
looked through her eyes upon that summer sea and saw a younger lover,
perhaps some one of those graceful and glowing heroes who occupy the
foreground of all young maidens' visions by the sea, yet she could not
find one more generous and gracious, nor fancy one more worthy and
loving than my grandfather Titbottom. And if in the moonlit midnight,
while he lay calmly sleeping, she leaned out of the window and sank
into vague reveries of sweet possibility, and watched the gleaming
path of the moonlight upon the water, until the dawn glided over
it--it was only that mood of nameless regret and longing, which
underlies all human happiness,--or it was the vision of that life of
society, which she had never seen, but of which she had often read,
and which looked very fair and alluring across the sea to a girlish
imagination which knew that it should never know that reality.

"These West Indian years were the great days of the family," said
Titbottom, with an air of majestic and regal regret, pausing and
musing in our little parlor, like a late Stuart in exile, remembering
England. Prue raised her eyes from her work, and looked at him with a
subdued admiration; for I have observed that, like the rest of her
sex, she has a singular sympathy with the representative of a reduced
family. Perhaps it is their finer perception which leads these
tender-hearted women to recognize the divine right of social
superiority so much more readily than we; and yet, much as Titbottom
was enhanced in my wife's admiration by the discovery