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 gunwale 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 deepwater cod swain close in shore , and the dogfish , with his poisonous horn , had not learned 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 cod-lines , 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 Marblehead 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 , than this , my calm old age .
It is XXXXX the sunny and sheltered slope of a valley , where , late in the autumn , the grass is greener than in August , and intermixed with golden dandelions , that have not been seen till now , since the first warmth of the year .
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