would have put it, but his phonetic theory appears to
have survived him in crankish brains here and there. As my discouraging
old friend was not exactly a public character, like the town crier or
Wibird Penhallow, I have intentionally thrown a veil over his identity.
I have, so to speak, dropped into his pouch a grain or two of that
magical fern-seed which was supposed by our English ancestors, in
Elizabeth's reign, to possess the quality of rendering a man invisible.

Another person who singularly interested me at this epoch was a person
with whom I had never exchanged a word, whose voice I had never heard,
but whose face was as familiar to me as every day could make it. For
each morning as I went to school, and each afternoon as I returned, I
saw this face peering out of a window in the second story of a shambling
yellow house situated in Washington Street, not far from the corner of
State. Whether some malign disease had fixed him to the chair he sat on,
or whether he had lost the use of his legs, or, possible, had none (the
upper part of him was that of a man in admirable health), presented a
problem which, with that curious insouciance of youth I made no attempt
to solve. It was an established fact, however, that he never went out of
that house. I cannot vouch so confidently for the cobwebby legend which
wove itself about him. It was to this effect: He had formerly been the
master of a large merchantman running between New York and Calcutta;
while still in his prime he had abruptly retired from the quarter-deck,
and seated himself at that window--where the outlook must have been the
reverse of exhilarating, for not ten persons passed in the course of the
day, and the hurried jingle of the bells on Parry's bakery-cart was the
only sound that ever shattered the silence. Whether it was an amatory
or a financial disappointment that turned him into a hermit was left to
ingenious conjecture. But there he sat, year in and year out, with his
cheek so close to the window that the nearest pane became permanently
blurred with his breath; for after his demise the blurr remained.

In this Arcadian era it was possible, in provincial places, for an
undertaker to assume the dimensions of a personage. There was a sexton
in Portsmouth--his name escapes me, but his attributes do not--whose
impressiveness made him own brother to the massive architecture of the
Stone Church. On every solemn occasion he was the striking figure,
even to