In truth , I dreaded him . -- When our children were old enough to claim his care , you remember , Susan , how I frowned , though you were pleased at this learned man 's encomiums on their proficiency . I feared to trust them even with the alphabet : it was the key to a fatal treasure . But I loved to lead them by their little hands along the beach and point to nature in the vast and the minute -- the sky , the sea , the green earth , the pebbles and the shells . Then did I discourse of the mighty works and coextensive goodness of the Deity with the simple wisdom of a man whose mind had profited by lonely days upon the deep and his heart by the strong and pure affections of his evening home . Sometimes my voice lost itself in a tremulous depth , for I felt his eye upon me as I spoke . 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 XXXXX 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 .
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