andsomely and naturally in the bow-window of his age, scanning
experience with reverted eye; and, chirping and smiling, communicates
the accidents and reads the lesson of his long career. Opinions are
strengthened, indeed, but they are also weeded out in the course of
years. What remains steadily present to the eye of the retired veteran
in his hermitage, what still ministers to his content, what still
quickens his old honest heart--these are "the real long-lived things"
that Whitman tells us to prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where
they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his
heart to beat in tune with his grey-bearded teacher's that a lesson may
be learned. I have known one old gentleman, whom I may name, for he is
now gathered to his stock--Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton, and
author of an excellent law-book still re-edited and republished. Whether
he was originally big or little is more than I can guess. When I knew
him he was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and shrunken; buckled
into a stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by ailments, which kept him
hobbling in and out of the room; one foot gouty; a wig for decency, not
for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under his chin--and for
that he never failed to apologise, for it went sore against the
traditions of his life. You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by
Miss Mather; yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year in
the plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming with human kindness,
and staunch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities. You could
not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat Shakespeare and
Webster and Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page together; but the
parchment was filled up, there was no room for fresh inscriptions, and
he was capable of repeating the same anecdote on many successive visits.
His voice survived in its full power, and he took a pride in using it.
On his last voyage as Commissioner of Lighthouses, he hailed a ship at
sea and made himself clearly audible without a speaking-trumpet,
ruffling the while with a proper vanity in his achievement. He had a
habit of eking out his words with interrogative hems, which was
puzzling and a little wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and
seemed a survival from some former stage of bodily portliness. Of yore,
when he was a great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may have
pointed with