rock which serves them for a table; and if spoons be scarce, I could pick up a clam-shell on the beach.  They see me now; and—­the blessing of a hungry man upon him!—­one of them sends up a hospitable shout:  “Halloo, Sir Solitary!  Come down and sup with us!” The ladies wave their handkerchiefs.  Can I decline?  No; and be it owned, after all my solitary joys, that this is the sweetest moment of a day by the seashore.

EDWARD FANE’S ROSEBUD.

There is hardly a more difficult exercise of fancy than, while gazing at a figure of melancholy age, to recreate its youth, and without entirely obliterating the identity of form and features to restore those graces which Time has snatched away.  Some old people—­especially women—­so age-worn and woeful are they, seem never to have been young and gay.  It is easier to conceive that such gloomy phantoms were sent into the world as withered and decrepit as we behold them now, with sympathies only for pain and grief, to watch at death-beds and weep at funerals.  Even the sable garments of their widowhood appear essential to their existence; all their attributes combine to render them darksome shadows creeping strangely amid the sunshine of human life.  Yet it is no unprofitable task to take one of these doleful creatures and set Fancy resolutely at work to brighten the dim eye, and darken the silvery locks, and paint the ashen cheek with rose-color, and repair the shrunken and crazy form, till a dewy maiden shall be seen in the old matron’s elbow-chair.  The miracle being wrought, then let the years roll back again, each sadder than the last, and the whole weight of age and sorrow settle down upon the youthful figure.  Wrinkles and furrows, the handwriting of Time, may thus be deciphered and found to contain deep lessons of thought and feeling.

Such profit might be derived by a skilful observer from my much-respected friend the Widow Toothaker, a nurse of great repute who has breathed the atmosphere of sick-chambers and dying-breaths these forty years.  See! she sits cowering over her lonesome hearth with her gown and upper petticoat drawn upward, gathering thriftily into her person the whole warmth of the fire which now at nightfall begins to dissipate the autumnal chill of her chamber.  The blaze quivers capriciously in front, alternately glimmering into the deepest chasms of her wrinkled visage, and then permitting a ghostly dimness to mar the outlines of her venerable figure.  And Nurse Toothaker holds a teaspoon in her right hand with which to stir up the contents of a tumbler in her left, whence steams a vapory fragrance abhorred of temperance societies.  Now she sips, now stirs, now sips again.  Her sad old heart has need to be revived by the rich infusion of Geneva which is mixed half and half with hot water in the tumbler.  All day long she has been sitting by a death-pillow, and quitted it for her home only when the spirit of her patient left the clay and went