There:  most stories of men’s lives end with the epitaph, but this of Pinckney’s shall begin there.  If we, as haply God or Devil can, could unroof the houses of men’s souls, if their visible works were of their hearts rather than their brains, we should know strange things.  And this alone, of all the possible, is certain.  For bethink you, how men appear to their Creator, as He looks down into the soul, that matrix of their visible lives we find so hard to localize and yet so sure to be.  For all of us believe in self, and few of us but are forced, one way or another, to grant existence to some selves outside of us.  Can you not fancy that men’s souls, like their farms, would show here a patch of grain, and there the tares; there the weeds and here the sowing; over this place the rain has been, and that other, to one looking down upon it from afar, seems brown and desolate, wasted by fire or made arid by the drought?  In this man’s life is a poor beginning, but a better end; in this other’s we see the foundations, the staging, and the schemes of mighty structures, now stopped, given over, or abandoned; of vessels, fashioned for the world’s seas, now rotting on the stocks.  Of this one all seems ready but the launching, of that the large keelson only has been laid; but both alike have died unborn, and the rain falls upon them, and the mosses grow:  the sound of labor is far off, and the scene of work is silent.  Small laws make great changes; slight differences of adjustment end quick in death.  Small, now, they would seem to us; but to the infinite mind all things small and great are alike; the spore of rust in the ear is very slight, but a famine in the corn will shake the world.

Pinckney’s life the world called lazy; his leisure was not fruitful, and his sixty years of life were but a gentleman’s.  Some slight lesion may have caused paralysis of energy, some clot of heart’s blood pressed upon the soul:  I make no doubt our doctors could diagnose it, if they knew a little more.  Tall and slender, he had a strange face, a face with a young man’s beauty; his white hair gave a charm to the rare smile, like new snow to the spring, and the slight stoop with which he walked was but a grace the more.  In short, Pinckney was interesting.  Women raved about him; young men fell in love with him; and if he was selfish, the fault lay between him and his Maker, not visible to other men.  There are three things that make a man interesting in his old age:  the first, being heroism, we may put aside; but the other two are regret and remorse.  Now, Mr. Pinckney’s fragrance was not of remorse—­ women and young men would have called it heroism:  it may have been.  As much heroism as could be practiced in thirty-six years of Carlsruhe.