I built a cottage for Susan and myself, and made a gateway in the form of a Gothic arch by setting up a whale’s jaw-bones.  We bought a heifer with her first calf, and had a little garden on the hillside to supply us with potatoes and green sauce for our fish.  Our parlor, small and neat, was ornamented with our two profiles in one gilt frame, and with shells and pretty pebbles on the mantelpiece, selected from the sea’s treasury of such things on Nahant Beach.  On the desk, beneath the looking-glass, lay the Bible, which I had begun to read aloud at the book of Genesis, and the singing-book that Susan used for her evening psalm.  Except the almanac, we had no other literature.  All that I heard of books was when an Indian history or tale of shipwreck was sold by a pedler or wandering subscription-man to some one in the village, and read through its owner’s nose to a slumbrous auditory.

Like my brother-fishermen, I grew into the belief that all human erudition was collected in our pedagogue, whose green spectacles and solemn phiz as he passed to his little schoolhouse amid a waste of sand might have gained him a diploma from any college in New England.  In truth, I dreaded him.—­When our children were old enough to claim his care, you remember, Susan, how I frowned, though you were pleased at this learned man’s encomiums on their proficiency.  I feared to trust them even with the alphabet:  it was the key to a fatal treasure.  But I loved to lead them by their little hands along the beach and point to nature in the vast and the minute—­the sky, the sea, the green earth, the pebbles and the shells.  Then did I discourse of the mighty works and coextensive goodness of the Deity with the simple wisdom of a man whose mind had profited by lonely days upon the deep and his heart by the strong and pure affections of his evening home.  Sometimes my voice lost itself in a tremulous depth, for I felt his eye upon me as I spoke.  Once, while my wife and all of us were gazing at ourselves in the mirror left by the tide in a hollow of the sand, I pointed to the pictured heaven below and bade her observe how religion was strewn everywhere in our path, since even a casual pool of water recalled the idea of that home whither we were travelling to rest for ever with our children.  Suddenly your image, Susan, and all the little faces made up of yours and mine, seemed to fade away and vanish around me, leaving a pale visage like my own of former days within the frame of a large looking-glass.  Strange illusion!

My life glided on, the past appearing to mingle with the present and absorb the future, till the whole lies before me at a glance.  My manhood has long been waning with a stanch decay; my earlier contemporaries, after lives of unbroken health, are all at rest without having known the weariness of later age; and now with a wrinkled forehead and thin white hair as badges of my dignity I have become the patriarch—­the uncle—­of the village.  I love that name:  it widens the circle of my sympathies; it joins all the youthful to my household in the kindred of affection.