Once , while my wife and all of us were gazing at ourselves in the mirror left by the tide in a hollow of the sand , I pointed to the pictured heaven below and bade her observe how religion was strewn everywhere in our path , since even a casual pool of water recalled the idea of that home whither we were travelling to rest for ever with our children . Suddenly your image , Susan , and all the little faces made up of yours and mine , seemed to fade away and vanish around me , leaving a pale visage like my own of former days within the frame of a large looking-glass . Strange illusion ! My life glided on , the past appearing to mingle with the present and absorb the future , till the whole lies before me at a glance . My manhood has long been waning with a stanch decay ; my earlier contemporaries , after lives of unbroken health , are all at rest without having known the weariness of later age ; and now with a wrinkled forehead and thin white hair as badges of my dignity I have become the patriarch -- the uncle -- of the village . I love that name : it widens the circle of my sympathies ; it joins all the youthful to my household in the kindred of affection . Like Uncle Parker , whose rheumatic bones were dashed against Egg Rock full forty years ago , I am a spinner of long yarns . Seated on the gunnel of a dory or on the sunny side of a boat-house , where the warmth is grateful to my limbs , or by my own hearth when a friend or two are there , I overflow with talk , and yet am never tedious . With a broken voice I give utterance to much wisdom . Such , Heaven be praised ! is the vigor of my faculties that many a forgotten usage , and traditions ancient in my youth , and early adventures of myself or others hitherto effaced by things more recent , acquire new distinctness in my memory . I remember the happy days when the haddock were more numerous on all the fishing-grounds than sculpins in the surf -- when the deep-water cod swam close in-shore , and the dogfish , with his poisonous horn , had not learnt to take the hook . I can number every equinoctial storm in which the sea has overwhelmed the street , flooded the cellars of the village and hissed upon our kitchen hearth . I give the history of the great whale that was landed on Whale Beach , and whose jaws , being now my gateway , will last for ages after my coffin shall have passed beneath them . Thence it is an easy digression to the halibut -- scarcely smaller than the whale -- which ran out six codlines and hauled my dory to the mouth of Boston harbor before I could touch him with the gaff . If melancholy accidents be the theme of conversation , I tell how a friend of mine was taken out of his boat by an enormous shark , and the sad , true tale of a young man on the eve of marriage who had been nine days missing , when his drowned body floated into the very pathway on Marble-head Neck that had often led him to the dwelling of his bride , as if the dripping corpse would have come where the mourner was . With such awful fidelity did that lover return to fulfil his vows ! Another favorite story is of a crazy maiden who conversed with angels and had the gift of prophecy , and whom all the village loved and pitied , though she went from door to door accusing us of sin , exhorting to repentance and foretelling our destruction by flood or earthquake . If the young men boast their knowledge of the ledges and sunken rocks , I speak of pilots who knew the wind by its scent and the wave by its taste , and could have steered blindfold to any port between Boston and Mount Desert guided only by the rote of the shore -- the peculiar sound of the surf on each island , beach and line of rocks along the coast . Thus do I talk , and all my auditors grow wise while they deem it pastime .
I recollect no happier portion of my life XXXXX this my calm old age .
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