“These West Indian years were the great days of the family,” said Titbottom, with an air of majestic and regal regret, pausing and musing in our little parlor, like a late Stuart in exile, remembering England.  Prue raised her eyes from her work, and looked at him with a subdued admiration; for I have observed that, like the rest of her sex, she has a singular sympathy with the representative of a reduced family.  Perhaps it is their finer perception which leads these tender-hearted women to recognize the divine right of social superiority so much more readily than we; and yet, much as Titbottom was enhanced in my wife’s admiration by the discovery that his dusky sadness of nature and expression was, as it were, the expiring gleam and late twilight of ancestral splendors, I doubt if Mr. Bourne would have preferred him for bookkeeper a moment sooner upon that account.  In truth, I have observed, down town, that the fact of your ancestors doing nothing is not considered good proof that you can do anything.  But Prue and her sex regard sentiment more than action, and I understand easily enough why she is never tired of hearing me read of Prince Charlie.  If Titbottom had been only a little younger, a little handsomer, a little more gallantly dressed—­in fact, a little more of the Prince Charlie, I am sure her eyes would not have fallen again upon her work so tranquilly, as he resumed his story.

“I can remember my grandfather Titbottom, although I was a very young child, and he was a very old man.  My young mother and my young grandmother are very distinct figures in my memory, ministering to the old gentleman, wrapped in his dressing-gown, and seated upon the piazza.  I remember his white hair and his calm smile, and how, not long before he died, he called me to him, and laying his hand upon my head, said to me: 

“My child, the world is not this great sunny piazza, nor life the fairy stories which the women tell you here as you sit in their laps.  I shall soon be gone, but I want to leave with you some memento of my love for you, and I know nothing more valuable than these spectacles, which your grandmother brought from her native island, when she arrived here one fine summer morning, long ago.  I cannot quite tell whether, when you grow older, you will regard it as a gift of the greatest value or as something that you had been happier never to have possessed.’

“‘But grandpapa, I am not short-sighted.’

“‘My son, are you not human?’ said the old gentleman; and how shall I ever forget the thoughtful sadness with which, at the same time he handed me the spectacles.