Not quite finished is the old man’s work who this afternoon sat in the chair and quietly dreamed back his youth.  I saw the hardened, withered face soften, as the bright light of childhood played around it; the meagre, hard old man forgot for a little the sharp want that pinched him; when he waked, he still babbled of green fields.

“Did Robinson Crusoe ever come back to his father and mother?” he says to me.  “Poor boy! poor boy!  I went to sea when I was young.  Father and mother didn’t like it.  Came back after a four-years’ voyage, and off again, soon as the ship had unloaded, on another trip up the Channel:  took all my money to fit out.  Might have had the Custom-House, if there had been anybody to speak for me; would have done my work well, and maybe had kept it thirty or forty years.  Should be glad to creep into a hay-mow and pay somebody to feed me.  Wish old Uncle Jack was good for somethin’ besides work, work,—­nothin’ but hard work!  Wish he could talk and say somethin’.

“Now that was good, sensible poetry you were reading, wasn’t it?  Good stuff?  Couldn’t hear a word of it:  poor old fellow can’t hear much now.  Wish my father had lived longer; he would have told me things; he used to be different to me.  I could have been a sight of comfort to him in mathematics.” (His father died when the son was fifty years old; the thirty years he had lived since seemed a long life to the old man.) “Mayn’t I look at the poetry?”

I found the place for him,—­“New England.”

“Yes, the farmer takes lots of comfort, walking on the road, foddering cattle, cutting wood.”

Uncle Jack believes heartily in New England corn, and in the planting and hoeing of Indian corn he takes great delight:  not to corn-laws, but to Indian corn, the talk always drifts.

“I hear you are going to plant a couple of acres of corn, Sir.  Glad of it.  This is an excellent dish of tea, Marm.  This bread tastes like my mother’s bread; baked in a bake-kettle.  These mangoes are nice,—­such as we used to have.”

Turning to Aunt Sarah, he says,—­

“Did you ever notice a difference in eggs, Marm?”

“Yes, Aunt thinks there is a difference between fresh and stale eggs.”

“But I mean, Marm, that some are thin-shelled, some rough, some round, some peaked:  a hen lays ’em just so all her life.  Ever see a difference?”

It is an open question.

Then turning to the master of the house,—­

“Do you like choc’late, Sir?  Well, how you going to fix it when you haven’t got any milk?  Well, you just beat up an egg, and pour on the choc’late, boiling hot, stirring all the time, and you won’t want any milk, Sir.  That was what kept me alive aboard the Ranger.”