Many such a day did I sit snugly in Mr. Bartlett’s store, attentive to the yarns of Uncle Parker—­uncle to the whole village by right of seniority, but of southern blood, with no kindred in New England.  His figure is before me now, enthroned upon a mackerel barrel—­a lean, old man, of great height, but bent with years, and twisted into an uncouth, shape by seven broken limbs; furrowed, also, and weather-worn, as if every gale, for the better part of a century, had caught him somewhere on the sea.  He looked like a harbinger of tempest, a shipmate of the Flying Dutchman....  One of Uncle Parker’s eyes had been blown out with gunpowder, and the other did but glimmer in its socket.  Turning it upward as he spoke, it was his delight to tell of cruises against the French, and battles with his own ship-mates, when he and an antagonist used to be seated astride of a sailor’s chest, each fastened down, by a spike-nail through his trousers, and there to fight it out.

* * * * *

From the “Blithedale Romance.”

=_298._= A PICTURE OF GIRLHOOD.

Priscilla had now grown to be a very pretty girl, and still kept budding and blossoming, and daily putting on some new charm, which you no sooner became sensible of than you thought it worth all she had previously possessed.  So unformed, vague, and without substance, as she had come to us, it seemed as if we could see Nature shaping out a woman before our very eyes, and yet had only a more reverential sense of the mystery of a woman’s soul and frame.  Yesterday, her cheek was pale,—­to-day it had a bloom.  Priscilla’s smile, like a baby’s first one, was a wondrous novelty.  Her imperfections and short-comings affected me with a kind of playful pathos, which was as absolutely bewitching a sensation as ever I experienced.  After she had been a month or two at Blithedale, her animal spirits waxed high, and kept her pretty constantly in a state of bubble and ferment, impelling her to far more bodily activity than she had yet strength to endure.  She was very fond of playing with the other girls out of doors.  There is hardly another sight in the world so pretty as that of a company of young girls, almost women grown, at play, and so giving themselves up to their airy impulse that their tiptoes barely touch the ground.

Girls are incomparably wilder and more effervescent than boys, more untamable, and regardless of rule and limit, with an ever-shifting variety, breaking continually into new modes of fun, yet with a harmonious propriety through all.  Their steps, their voices, appear free as the wind, but keep consonance with a strain of music inaudible to us.  Young men and boys, on the other hand, play according to recognized law, old, traditionary games, permitting no caprioles of fancy, but with scope enough for the outbreak of savage instincts....

Especially it is delightful to see a vigorous young girl run a race, with her head thrown back, her limbs moving more friskily than they need, and an air between that of a bird and a young colt.  But Priscilla’s peculiar, charm, in a foot-race, was the weakness and irregularity with which she ran....