he could not make you think or say you were so and so too.  The querulous note was not in his most cheerful register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; though sometimes I have known him touch very lightly and currently upon a slight annoyance, or disrelish for this or that.  As he grew older, he must have had, of course, an old man’s disposition to speak of his infirmities; but it was fine to see him catch himself up in this, when he became conscious of it, and stop short with an abrupt turn to something else.  With a real interest, which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate some little ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, and I have heard him expatiate with childlike delight upon the merits of a new razor he had got:  a sort of mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and chin without the least danger of cutting himself.  The last time I saw him he asked me if he had ever shown me that miraculous razor; and I doubt if he quite liked my saying I had seen one of the same kind.

It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chimney-corner rather as the type of a person having a good time than as such a person; he would rather be up and about something, taking down a book, making a note, going again to his little windows, and asking you if you had seen the crows yet that sometimes alighted on the shoals left bare by the ebb-tide behind the house.  The reader will recall his lovely poem, “My Aviary,” which deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect.  I shared with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used to come into our neighbor waters in spring, when the ice broke up, and stayed as long as the smallest space of brine remained unfrozen in the fall.  He was graciously willing I should share in them, and in the cloud of gulls which drifted about in the currents of the sea and sky there, almost the whole year round.  I did not pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I did to the place, and I think my deference pleased him.

VII.

As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked you to respect them, or to be sensible of them.  As often as I went to see him I was made to wait in the little reception-room below, and never shown at once to his study.  My name would be carried up, and I would hear him verifying my presence from the maid through the opened door; then there came a cheery cry of wellcome:  “Is that you?  Come up, come up!” and I found him sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me.  He would make an excuse for having kept me below a moment, and say something about the rule he had to observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his fence a personal thing.  I was aware how thoroughly his gentle spirit pervaded the whole house; the Irish maid who opened the door had the effect of being a neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little formality; she apologized in her turn for the reception-room; there was certainly nothing trampled upon in her manner, but affection and reverence for him whose gate she guarded, with something like the sentiment she would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church, but nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat’s peculiar merits.