Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/121

108 and walking fearfully swift. He wonders, where all the old folks are. Once, when a boy, he could not find people young enough for him, and sidled up to any young stranger he met on Sundays, wondering why God made the world so old. Now he goes to Commencement to see his grandsons take their degree, and is astonished at the youth of the audience. "This is new," he says; "it did not use to be so fifty years before." At meeting, the minister seems surprisingly young, the audience young; and he looks round and is astonished that there are so few venerable heads. The audience seems not decorous; they come in late, and hurry off early, clapping the doors to after them with irreverent bang. But Grandfather is decorous, well-mannered, early in his seat: jostled, he jostles not again; elbowed, he returns it not; crowded, he thinks no evil. He is gentlemanly to the rude, obliging to the insolent and vulgar;—for Grandfather is a gentleman, not puffed up with mere money, but edified with well-grown manliness. Time has dignified his good-manners.

Now it is night. Grandfather sits by his old-fashioned fire. The family are all a-bed. He draws his old fashioned chair nearer to the hearth. On the stand which his mother gave him are the candlesticks, also of old time. The candles are three-quarters burnt down ; the fire on the hearth also is low. He has been thoughtful all day, talking half to himself, chanting a bit of verse, humming a snatch of an old tune. He kissed more tenderly than common his youngest grand-daughter, — the family pet,—before she went to bed. He takes out of his bosom a little locket: nobody ever sees it. Therein are two little twists of hair; common hair: it might be yours or mine. But as Grandfather looks at them, the outer twist of hair becomes a whole head of most ambrosial curls. He remembers the stolen interviews, the meetings by moonlight, and how sweet the evening star looked, and how he laid his hand on another's shoulder. "You are my evening star," quoth he. He remembers He thinks of his bridal hour.

In the stillness of the great slumbering town, while life