I have been at my old friend’s various times since.  I do not know a visiting place where every guest is so perfectly at his ease; nowhere, where harmony is so strangely the result of confusion.  Every body is at cross purposes, yet the effect is so much better than uniformity.  Contradictory orders; servants pulling one way; master and mistress driving some other, yet both diverse; visitors huddled up in corners; chairs unsymmetrised; candles disposed by chance; meals at odd hours, tea and supper at once, or the latter preceding the former; the host and the guest conferring, yet each upon a different topic, each understanding himself, neither trying to understand or hear the other; draughts and politics, chess and political economy, cards and conversation on nautical matters, going on at once, without the hope, or indeed the wish, of distinguishing them, make it altogether the most perfect concordia discors you shall meet with.  Yet somehow the old house is not quite what it should be.  The Admiral still enjoys his pipe, but he has no Miss Emily to fill it for him.  The instrument stands where it stood, but she is gone, whose delicate touch could sometimes for a short minute appease the warring elements.  He has learnt, as Marvel expresses it, to “make his destiny his choice.”  He bears bravely up, but he does not come out with his flashes of wild wit so thick as formerly.  His sea songs seldomer escape him.  His wife, too, looks as if she wanted some younger body to scold and set to rights.  We all miss a junior presence.  It is wonderful how one young maiden freshens up, and keeps green, the paternal roof.  Old and young seem to have an interest in her, so long as she is not absolutely disposed of.  The youthfulness of the house is flown.  Emily is married.

THE CHILD ANGEL

A DREAM

I chanced upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical thing of a dream the other night, that you shall hear of.  I had been reading the “Loves of the Angels,” and went to bed with my head full of speculations, suggested by that extraordinary legend.  It had given birth to innumerable conjectures; and, I remember, the last waking thought, which I gave expression to on my pillow, was a sort of wonder, “what could come of it.”

I was suddenly transported, how or whither I could scarcely make out—­but to some celestial region.  It was not the real heavens neither—­not the downright Bible heaven—­but a kind of fairyland heaven, about which a poor human fancy may have leave to sport and air itself, I will hope, without presumption.

Methought—­what wild things dreams are!—­I was present—­at what would you imagine?—­at an angel’s gossiping.

Whence it came, or how it came, or who bid it come, or whether it came purely of its own head, neither you nor I know—­but there lay, sure enough, wrapped in its little cloudy swaddling bands—­a Child Angel.