Your own poor, battered hulk wants no jaunty-trimmed craft for consort; but twin of heart and soul, as you are twin of years, you float tranquilly toward that haven which lies before us all.
Your children, now almost verging on maturity, bless your hearth and home. Not one is gone. Frank indeed--that wild fellow of a youth, who has wrought your heart into perplexing anxieties again and again, as you have seen the wayward dashes of his young blood--is often away. But his heart yet centres where yours centres; and his absence is only a nearer and bolder strife with that fierce world whose circumstances every man of force and energy is born to conquer.
His return from time to time with that proud figure of opening manliness, and that full flush of health, speaks to your affections as you could never have believed it would. It is not for a man, who is the father of a man, to show any weakness of the heart, or any over-sensitiveness, in those ties which bind him to his kin. And yet--yet, as you sit by your fireside, with your clear, gray eye feasting in its feebleness on that proud figure of a man who calls you "father,"--and as you see his fond and loving attentions to that one who has been your partner in all anxieties and joys, there _is_ a throbbing within your bosom that makes you almost wish him young again,--that you might embrace him now, as when he warbled in your rejoicing ear those first words of love!--Ah, how little does a son know the secret and craving tenderness of a parent,--how little conception has he of those silent bursts of fondness and of joy which attend his coming, and which crown his parting!
There is young Madge too,--dark-eyed, tall, with a pensive shadow resting on her face,--the very image of refinement and of delicacy. She is thoughtful;--not breaking out, like the hoiden, flax-haired Nelly, into bursts of joy and singing,--but stealing upon your heart with a gentle and quiet tenderness that diffuses itself throughout the household like a soft zephyr of summer.
There are friends too yet left, who come in upon your evening hours, and light up the loitering time with dreamy story of the years that are gone. How eagerly you listen to some gossiping veteran friend, who with his deft words calls up the thread of some by-gone years of life; and with what a careless, yet grateful recognition you lapse, as it were, into the current of the past, and live over again by your hospitable blaze the stir, the joy, and the pride of your lost manhood.