ng the pathetic passages from both
books, and I can still hear his rich, vibrant voice as it lingered in
tremulous emotion on the periods he loved. He would catch the volume up
anywhere, any time, and begin to read, at the book-store, or the harness-
shop, or the law-office, it did not matter in the wide leisure of a
country village, in those days before the war, when people had all the
time there was; and he was sure of his audience as long as he chose to
read. One Christmas eve, in answer to a general wish, he read the
'Christmas Carol' in the Court-house, and people came from all about to
hear him.

He was an invalid and he died long since, ending a life of suffering in
the saddest way. Several years before his death money fell to his
family, and he went with them to an Eastern city, where he tried in vain
to make himself at home. He never ceased to pine for the village he had
left, with its old companionships, its easy usages, its familiar faces;
and he escaped to it again and again, till at last every tie was severed,
and he could come back no more. He was never reconciled to the change,
and in a manner he did really die of the homesickness which deepened an
hereditary taint, and enfeebled him to the disorder that carried him.
off. My memories of Dickens remain mingled with my memories of this
quaint and most original genius, and though I knew Dickens long before I
knew his lover, I can scarcely think of one without thinking of the
other.

XVI. WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER

Certain other books I associate with another pathetic nature, of whom the
organ-builder and I were both fond. This was the young poet who looked
after the book half of the village drug and book store, and who wrote
poetry in such leisure as he found from his duties, and with such
strength as he found in the disease preying upon him. He must have been
far gone in consumption when I first knew him, for I have no recollection
of a time when his voice was not faint and husky, his sweet smile wan,
and his blue eyes dull with the disease that wasted him away,

"Like wax in the fire,
Like snow in the sun."

People spoke of him as once strong and vigorous, but I recall him fragile
and pale, gentle, patient, knowing his inexorable doom, and not hoping or
seeking to escape it. As the end drew near he left his employment and
went home to the farm, some twenty miles away, where I drove out to see
him once through the deep snow of