A friend of mine declares that he went lately into a
country bank, nearby, and found no one on duty. Being of opinion that
there should always be someone behind the counter of a bank, he went
there himself. Wishing to be informed as to the resources of his
establishment, he explored desks and vaults, found a good deal of paper
of different kinds, and some rich veins of copper, but no cashier.
Going to the door again in some anxiety, he encountered a casual
school-boy, who kindly told him that he did not know where the
financial officer might be at the precise moment of inquiry, but that
half an hour before he was on the wharf, fishing.

Death comes to the aged at last, however, even in Oldport. We have
lately lost, for instance, that patient old postman, serenest among our
human antiquities, whose deliberate tread might have imparted a tone of
repose to Broadway, could any imagination have transferred him thither.
Through him the correspondence of other days came softened of all
immediate solicitude. Ere it reached you, friends had died or
recovered, debtors had repented, creditors grown kind, or your children
had paid your debts. Perils had passed, hopes were chastened, and the
most eager expectant took calmly the missive from that tranquillizing
hand. Meeting his friends and clients with a step so slow that it did
not even stop rapidly, he, like Tennyson's Mariana, slowly

"From his bosom drew
Old letters."

But a summons came at last, not to be postponed even by him. One day he
delivered his mail as usual, with no undue precipitation; on the next,
the blameless soul was himself taken and forwarded on some celestial
route.

Irreparable would have seemed his loss, did there not still linger
among us certain types of human antiquity that might seem to disprove
the fabled youth of America. One veteran I daily meet, of uncertain
age, perhaps, but with at least that air of brevet antiquity which long
years of unruffled indolence can give. He looks as if he had spent at
least half a lifetime on the sunny slope of some beach, and the other
half in leaning upon his elbows at the window of some sailor
boarding-house. He is hale and broad, with a head sunk between two
strong shoulders; his beard falls like snow upon his breast, longer and
longer each year, while his slumberous thoughts seem to move slowly
enough to watch it as it grows. I always fancy that these meditations
have drifted far astern of t