"Ah, thank you," said our guest. "Yes, Mr. Coverdale, I used to sell a
good many of those little purses."
He spoke languidly, and only those few words, like a watch with an
inelastic spring, that just ticks a moment or two and stops again. He
seemed a very forlorn old man. In the wantonness of youth, strength,
and comfortable condition,--making my prey of people's individualities,
as my custom was,--I tried to identify my mind with the old fellow's,
and take his view of the world, as if looking through a smoke-blackened
glass at the sun. It robbed the landscape of all its life.
Those pleasantly swelling slopes of our farm, descending towards the wide
meadows, through which sluggishly circled the brimful tide of the
Charles, bathing the long sedges on its hither and farther shores; the
broad, sunny gleam over the winding water; that peculiar
picturesqueness of the scene where capes and headlands put themselves
boldly forth upon the perfect level of the meadow, as into a green
lake, with inlets between the promontories; the shadowy woodland, with
twinkling showers of light falling into its depths; the sultry
heat-vapor, which rose everywhere like incense, and in which my soul
delighted, as indicating so rich a fervor in the passionate day, and in
the earth that was burning with its love,--I beheld all these things as
through old Moodie's eyes. When my eyes are dimmer than they have yet
come to be, I will go thither again, and see if I did not catch the
tone of his mind aright, and if the cold and lifeless tint of his
perceptions be not then repeated in my own.
Yet it was unaccountable to myself, the interest that I felt in him.
"Have you any objection," said I, "to telling me who made those little
purses?"
"Gentlemen have often asked me that," said Moodie slowly; "but I shake
my head, and say little or nothing, and creep out of the way as well as
I can. I am a man of few words; and if gentlemen were to be told one
thing, they would be very apt, I suppose, to ask me another. But it
happens just now, Mr. Coverdale, that you can tell me more about the
maker of those little purses than I can tell you."
"Why do you trouble him with needless questions, Coverdale?"
interrupted Hollingsworth. "You must have known, long ago, that it was
Priscilla. And so, my good friend, you have come to see her? Well, I
am glad of it. You will find her altered very much for the better,
since that winter evening when you put her into my charge. Why,
Priscilla has a bloom in her cheeks, now!"