Page:Mosses from an old manse.djvu/50

 grandmother. But the hand that renovates is always more sacrilegious than that which destroys. In fine, we gathered up our household goods, drank a farewell cup of tea in our pleasant little breakfast-room,--delicately fragrant tea, an unpurchasable luxury, one of the many angel gifts that had fallen like dew upon us,--and passed forth between the tall stone gate-posts as uncertain as the wandering Arabs where our tent might next be pitched. Providence took me by the hand, and--an oddity of dispensation which, I trust, there is no irreverence in smiling at--has led me, as the newspapers announce while I am writing, from the Old Manse into a custom-house. As a story-teller, I have often contrived strange vicissitudes for my imaginary personages, but none like this.

The treasure of intellectual gold which I hoped to find in our secluded dwelling had never come to light. No profound treatise of ethics, no philosophic history, no novel even, that could stand unsupported on its edges. All that I had to show, as a man of letters, were these, few tales and essays, which had blossomed out like flowers in the calm summer of my heart and mind. Save editing (an easy task) the journal of my friend of many years, the African Cruiser, I had done nothing else. With these idle weeds and withering blossoms I have intermixed some that were produced long ago,--old, faded things, reminding me of flowers pressed between the leaves of a book,--and now offer the bouquet, such as it is, to any whom it may please. These fitful sketches, with so little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose,--so reserved, even while they sometimes seem so frank,--often but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image,--such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary