Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/317

 sunshine and the beauty of the quiet hour? Would a rich man have felt the pride of ownership in all that exquisite color, in those reaches of marsh and of sea; would a famous man have been left in peace, day after day, to live his own life and think his own thoughts, with no more importunate neighbor than old Marm Hawkins with her quavering voice and hobbling step? Uncle Bobby did not know he was a poet. He did not know that the deep content in which he habitually dwelt was something rare in this restless world. He did not know that the smell of the salt air was more delicious to him than to others, that the country side was fairer, the sea wider, the old lobster-houses and fishing-smacks prettier in his eyes than in the eyes of his neighbors. He often looked wistfully down the vista of years to the distant past, and he fancied it fairer than the present. But then he had the past, too, as a part of the poem of life. Down that dim vista shone one sweet girlish face, one sweet girlish voice echoed low and clear. More than forty years ago that voice had been hushed, that face had been shut away from the sun, yet death could not complete his conquest over gentle Annie Wells so long as her old lover lived.

Uncle Bobby was a bachelor, but he did not feel in the least likeone. What had hein common with those loveless beings who grow old and cranky in the pride of celibacy? He, for his part, had no patience with old bachelors.