ake. This weight of years had a
perennial novelty for the poor sufferer. He never grew accustomed to it,
but, long as he had now borne the fretful torpor of his waning life, and
patient as he seemed, he still retained an inward consciousness that
these stiffened shoulders, these quailing knees, this cloudiness of
sight and brain, this confused forgetfulness of men and affairs, were
troublesome accidents that did not really belong to him. He possibly
cherished a half-recognized idea that they might pass away. Youth,
however eclipsed for a season, is undoubtedly the proper, permanent, and
genuine condition of man; and if we look closely into this dreary
delusion of growing old, we shall find that it never absolutely succeeds
in laying hold of our innermost convictions. A sombre garment, woven of
life's unrealities, has muffled us from our true self, but within it
smiles the young man whom we knew; the ashes of many perishable things
have fallen upon our youthful fire, but beneath them lurk the seeds of
inextinguishable flame. So powerful is this instinctive faith that men
of simple modes of character are prone to antedate its consummation. And
thus it happened with poor Grandsir Dolliver, who often awoke from an
old man's fitful sleep with a sense that his senile predicament was but
a dream of the past night; and hobbling hastily across the cold floor to
the looking-glass, he would be grievously disappointed at beholding the
white hair, the wrinkles and furrows, the ashen visage and bent form,
the melancholy mask of Age, in which, as he now remembered, some strange
and sad enchantment had involved him for years gone by!

To other eyes than his own, however, the shrivelled old gentleman looked
as if there were little hope of his throwing off this too artfully
wrought disguise, until, at no distant day, his stooping figure should
be straightened out, his hoary locks be smoothed over his brows, and his
much enduring bones be laid safely away, with a green coverlet spread
over them, beside his Bessie, who doubtless would recognize her youthful
companion in spite of his ugly garniture of decay. He longed to be gazed
at by the loving eyes now closed; he shrank from the hard stare of them
that loved him not. Walking the streets seldom and reluctantly, he felt
a dreary impulse to elude the people's observation, as if with a sense
that he had gone irrevocably out of fashion, and broken his connecting
links with the network of human