age, and read through its owner's nose to a slumbrous auditory.

Like my brother-fishermen, I grew into the belief that all human
erudition was collected in our pedagogue, whose green spectacles and
solemn phiz as he passed to his little schoolhouse amid a waste of
sand might have gained him a diploma from any college in New England.
In truth, I dreaded him.--When our children were old enough to claim
his care, you remember, Susan, how I frowned, though you were pleased
at this learned man's encomiums on their proficiency. I feared to
trust them even with the alphabet: it was the key to a fatal treasure.
But I loved to lead them by their little hands along the beach and
point to nature in the vast and the minute--the sky, the sea, the
green earth, the pebbles and the shells. Then did I discourse of the
mighty works and coextensive goodness of the Deity with the simple
wisdom of a man whose mind had profited by lonely days upon the deep
and his heart by the strong and pure affections of his evening home.
Sometimes my voice lost itself in a tremulous depth, for I felt his
eye upon me as I spoke. Once, while my wife and all of us were gazing
at ourselves in the mirror left by the tide in a hollow of the sand, I
pointed to the pictured heaven below and bade her observe how religion
was strewn everywhere in our path, since even a casual pool of water
recalled the idea of that home whither we were travelling to rest for
ever with our children. Suddenly your image, Susan, and all the little
faces made up of yours and mine, seemed to fade away and vanish around
me, leaving a pale visage like my own of former days within the frame
of a large looking-glass. Strange illusion!

My life glided on, the past appearing to mingle with the present and
absorb the future, till the whole lies before me at a glance. My
manhood has long been waning with a stanch decay; my earlier
contemporaries, after lives of unbroken health, are all at rest
without having known the weariness of later age; and now with a
wrinkled forehead and thin white hair as badges of my dignity I have
become the patriarch--the uncle--of the village. I love that name: it
widens the circle of my sympathies; it joins all the youthful to my
household in the kindred of affection.

Like Uncle Parker, whose rheumatic bones were dashed against Egg Rock
full forty years ago, I am a spinner of long yarns. Seated on the
gunnel of a dory or on the sunny side of a boat-house, where