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Old Sam, like Hugh, had heard Irving Stanley's impassioned words, for the window nearby was opened wide; he had seen, too, the deadly pallor on Hugh's face, and how for an instant he staggered, as from a blow, covering his eyes with his hands and whispering as he passed the negro, "Oh, Alice, Golden Hair!"
As you read the story of his life you feel its constant gayety and cheerfulness. It was the life of a literary man and a man of society a life without events, or only the events of all our lives, except that it lacks the great event of marriage. In place of it there is a tender and pathetic romance. Irving lived to be seventy-six years old.
Alice had a tolerably clear insight into Irving Stanley's character, and immediately her mind conjured up visions of what might be the result of a sea voyage and months of intimate companionship with that sweet-faced governess, "who wore her soft, brown hair short in her neck."
"To look upon its grass-grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there, at least, the dead might rest in peace," and there Irving himself rests in peace with a plain white stone at his head which modestly tells that
It was the absurdity of such contrasts as this running all through the annals of the Dutch in America that inspired Washington Irving to write his infinitely humorous "History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty," by "Diedrich Knickerbocker." It is difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to take the Dutch in America seriously.
Irving made no reply, except to chafe the hands which clasped his so tightly, and the doctor continued: "I am surely dying I shall never see her more, or my boy, my beautiful boy. I was a brute in the cars; you remember the time. That was Adah, and those little feet resting on my lap were Willie's, baby Willie's, Adah's baby."
Pierre M. Irving, has given no description of his appearance; but a relative, who saw much of our author in his latter years, writes to me: "He had dark gray eyes; a handsome straight nose, which might perhaps be called large; a broad, high, full forehead, and a small mouth. I should call him of medium height, about five feet eight and a half to nine inches, and inclined to be a trifle stout.
His Life and Voyages. By Washington Irving. A new edition, complete in one volume, foolscap 8vo., with an illustration. Bound in cloth, full gilt back, and emblematical design on side, 3s. 6d. "One of the most fascinating and intensely interesting books in the whole compass of English literature; it has all the interest of romance blended with the truth of history."
Murray, the London publisher, paid him over fifteen thousand dollars for the English copyright alone. In his study among the ruins of Spain, Irving found many other things which greatly interested him legends, and tales of the Moors who had once ruled there, and of the ruined beauties of the Moorish palace of the Alhambra.
The nurse said to General Washington, "Please, your Honor, here is a bairn that is named for you." "Bairn" is a Scotch word for child. Washington put his hand on the little boy's head and gave him his blessing. When Irving became an author, he wrote a life of Washington. Little Irving was a merry, playful boy. He was full of mischief.
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