the
warmth is grateful to my limbs, or by my own hearth when a friend or
two are there, I overflow with talk, and yet am never tedious. With a
broken voice I give utterance to much wisdom. Such, Heaven be praised!
is the vigor of my faculties that many a forgotten usage, and
traditions ancient in my youth, and early adventures of myself or
others hitherto effaced by things more recent, acquire new
distinctness in my memory. I remember the happy days when the haddock
were more numerous on all the fishing-grounds than sculpins in the
surf--when the deep-water cod swam close in-shore, and the dogfish,
with his poisonous horn, had not learnt to take the hook. I can number
every equinoctial storm in which the sea has overwhelmed the street,
flooded the cellars of the village and hissed upon our kitchen hearth.
I give the history of the great whale that was landed on Whale Beach,
and whose jaws, being now my gateway, will last for ages after my
coffin shall have passed beneath them. Thence it is an easy digression
to the halibut--scarcely smaller than the whale--which ran out six
codlines and hauled my dory to the mouth of Boston harbor before I
could touch him with the gaff.

If melancholy accidents be the theme of conversation, I tell how a
friend of mine was taken out of his boat by an enormous shark, and the
sad, true tale of a young man on the eve of marriage who had been nine
days missing, when his drowned body floated into the very pathway on
Marble-head Neck that had often led him to the dwelling of his bride,
as if the dripping corpse would have come where the mourner was. With
such awful fidelity did that lover return to fulfil his vows! Another
favorite story is of a crazy maiden who conversed with angels and had
the gift of prophecy, and whom all the village loved and pitied,
though she went from door to door accusing us of sin, exhorting to
repentance and foretelling our destruction by flood or earthquake. If
the young men boast their knowledge of the ledges and sunken rocks, I
speak of pilots who knew the wind by its scent and the wave by its
taste, and could have steered blindfold to any port between Boston and
Mount Desert guided only by the rote of the shore--the peculiar sound
of the surf on each island, beach and line of rocks along the coast.
Thus do I talk, and all my auditors grow wise while they deem it
pastime.

I recollect no happier portion of my life than this my calm old age.
It is like the sun