attendant sail,
Pursue the triumph and partake the gale."

The ghost of the person condemned to walk the earth in a biography
glides into a public library, and goes to the shelf where his mummied
life lies in its paper cerements. I can see the pale shadow glancing
through the pages and hear the comments that shape themselves in the
bodiless intelligence as if they were made vocal by living lips.

"Born in July, 1776!" And my honored father killed at the battle of
Bunker Hill! Atrocious libeller! to slander one's family at the start
after such a fashion!

"The death of his parents left him in charge of his Aunt Nancy, whose
tender care took the place of those parental attentions which should
have guided and protected his infant years, and consoled him for the
severity of another relative."

--Aunt Nancy! It was Aunt Betsey, you fool! Aunt Nancy used to--she has
been dead these eighty years, so there is no use in mincing matters--she
used to keep a bottle and a stick, and when she had been tasting a drop
out of the bottle the stick used to come off the shelf and I had to
taste that. And here she is made a saint of, and poor Aunt Betsey, that
did everything for me, is slandered by implication as a horrid tyrant.

"The subject of this commemorative history was remarkable for a
precocious development of intelligence. An old nurse who saw him at the
very earliest period of his existence is said to have spoken of him as
one of the most promising infants she had seen in her long experience.
At school he was equally remarkable, and at a tender age he received a
paper adorned with a cut, inscribed REWARD OF MERIT."

--I don't doubt the nurse said that,--there were several promising
children born about that time. As for cuts, I got more from the
schoolmaster's rattan than in any other shape. Didn't one of my teachers
split a Gunter's scale into three pieces over the palm of my hand?
And didn't I grin when I saw the pieces fly? No humbug, now, about my
boyhood!

"His personal appearance was not singularly prepossessing. Inconspicuous
in stature and unattractive in features."

--You misbegotten son of an ourang and grandson of an ascidian (ghosts
keep up with science, you observe), what business have you to be holding
up my person to the contempt of my posterity? Haven't I been sleeping
for this many a year in quiet, and don't the dandelions and buttercups
look as yellow over me as over the best-looking neighbor I have