The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had lately knocked at my own door was about to enter.  I met the master of the house on the landing of the stairs outside his study, and he led me in for the few moments we could spend together.  He spoke of the shadow so near, and said he supposed there could be no hope, but he did not refuse the cheer I offered him from my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath of laughter, so potent is the wont of a lifetime, though his eyes were full of tears, and his voice broke with his words.  Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best.

It was during the few years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France.  He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand.  He whimsically pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and enjoyed contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of the Derby won; nothing else in England seemed to have moved him so much, though all that royalties, dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had been done.  Of certain things that happened to him, characteristic of the English, and interesting to him in their relation to himself through his character of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but he has said what he chose to the public about them, and I have no right to say more.  The thing that most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have been described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him accused of it before.  “Oh, yes,” he said, “I am a little hard of hearing on one side.  But it isn’t deafness.”

He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make themselves painfully or inconveniently evident.  He carried his slight figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure.  Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something that was said, and “They will shrink, you know,” he added, as if he were not at all concerned in the fact himself.  If you met him in the street, you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary frown of his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well gloved, in a silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed.  Sometimes he did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think it was kind to spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at any rate, I am glad of the times when I did so.  In society he had the same vagueness, the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make sure of you, he was as vivid as ever in his life.  He made me think of a bed of embers on which the ashes