With an involuntary start you seize hold on consciousness, and prove yourself but half awake by running a doubtful parallel between human life and the hour which has now elapsed.  In both you emerge from mystery, pass through a vicissitude that you can but imperfectly control, and are borne onward to another mystery.  Now comes the peal of the distant clock with fainter and fainter strokes as you plunge farther into the wilderness of sleep.  It is the knell of a temporary death.  Your spirit has departed, and strays like a free citizen among the people of a shadowy world, beholding strange sights, yet without wonder or dismay.  So calm, perhaps, will be the final change—­so undisturbed, as if among familiar things, the entrance of the soul to its eternal home.

THE VILLAGE UNCLE.

AN IMAGINARY RETROSPECT.

Come! another log upon the hearth.  True, our little parlor is comfortable, especially here where the old man sits in his old arm-chair; but on Thanksgiving-night the blaze should dance higher up the chimney and send a shower of sparks into the outer darkness.  Toss on an armful of those dry oak chips, the last relicts of the Mermaid’s knee-timbers—­the bones of your namesake, Susan.  Higher yet, and clearer, be the blaze, till our cottage windows glow the ruddiest in the village and the light of our household mirth flash far across the bay to Nahant.

And now come, Susan; come, my children.  Draw your chairs round me, all of you.  There is a dimness over your figures.  You sit quivering indistinctly with each motion of the blaze, which eddies about you like a flood; so that you all have the look of visions or people that dwell only in the firelight, and will vanish from existence as completely as your own shadows when the flame shall sink among the embers.

Hark! let me listen for the swell of the surf; it should be audible a mile inland on a night like this.  Yes; there I catch the sound, but only an uncertain murmur, as if a good way down over the beach, though by the almanac it is high tide at eight o’clock, and the billows must now be dashing within thirty yards of our door.  Ah! the old man’s ears are failing him, and so is his eyesight, and perhaps his mind, else you would not all be so shadowy in the blaze of his Thanksgiving fire.

How strangely the past is peeping over the shoulders of the present!  To judge by my recollections, it is but a few moments since I sat in another room.  Yonder model of a vessel was not there, nor the old chest of drawers, nor Susan’s profile and mine in that gilt frame—­nothing, in short, except this same fire, which glimmered on books, papers and a picture, and half discovered my solitary figure in a looking-glass.  But it was paler than my rugged old self, and younger, too, by almost half a century.