he times, but are following after, in
patient hopelessness, as a dog swims behind a boat. What knows he of
the President's Message? He has just overtaken some remarkable catch of
mackerel in the year thirty-eight. His hands lie buried fathom-deep in
his pockets, as if part of his brain lay there to be rummaged; and he
sucks at his old pipe as if his head, like other venerable hulks, must
be smoked out at intervals. His walk is that of a sloth, one foot
dragging heavily behind the other. I meet him as I go to the
post-office, and on returning, twenty minutes later, I pass him again,
a little farther advanced. All the children accost him, and I have seen
him stop--no great retardation indeed--to fondle in his arms a puppy or
a kitten. Yet he is liable to excitement, in his way; for once, in some
high debate, wherein he assisted as listener, when one old man on a
wharf was doubting the assertion of another old man about a certain
equinoctial gale, I saw my friend draw his right hand slowly and
painfully from his pocket, and let it fall by his side. It was really
one of the most emphatic gesticulations I ever saw, and tended
obviously to quell the rising discord. It was as if the herald at a
tournament had dropped his truncheon, and the fray must end.

Women's faces are apt to take from old age a finer touch than those of
men, and poverty does not interfere with this, where there is no actual
exposure to the elements. From the windows of these old houses there
often look forth delicate, faded countenances, to which belongs an air
of unmistakable refinement. Nowhere in America, I fancy, does one see
such counterparts of the reduced gentlewoman of England,--as described,
for instance, in "Cranford,"--quiet maiden ladies of seventy, with
perhaps a tradition of beauty and bellehood, and still wearing always a
bit of blue ribbon on their once golden curls,--this headdress being
still carefully arranged, each day, by some handmaiden of sixty, so
long a house-mate as to seem a sister, though some faint suggestion of
wages and subordination may be still preserved. Among these ladies, as
in "Cranford," there is a dignified reticence in respect to
money-matters, and a courteous blindness to the small economies
practised by each other. It is not held good breeding, when they meet
in a shop of a morning, for one to seem to notice what another buys.

These ancient ladies have coats of arms upon their walls, hereditary
damasks among the