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Could it be that she approved what I had been saying? I hardly knew. Poor old lady, she did not know herself. She was asleep! With my Reader. Having silenced my Aunt Tabithy, I shall be generous enough, in my triumph, to offer an explanatory chat to my reader. This is a history of Dreams; and there will be those who will sneer at such a history, as the work of a dreamer.
"Ah, Isaac," said she, "all that is exhausted; you have rung so many changes on your hopes and your dreams, that you have nothing left but to make them real if you can." It is very idle to get angry with a good-natured old lady. I did better than this, I made her listen to me. Exhausted, do you say, Aunt Tabithy? Is life then exhausted; is hope gone out; is fancy dead? No, no.
As the girl passed through the kitchen, she seized a horn that hung upon the wall, and went out into the darkness. The old women continued their smoking, their snuff-rubbing, and their gossiping. Mrs. High-tower was giving the details of a local legend showing how and why Edny Favers had "conjured" Tabithy Cozby, when suddenly Mrs. Poteet raised her hands "Sh-h-h!"
"Ah," said my Aunt Tabithy, as she smoothed the stocking-leg again, with a sigh, "there is, after all, but one youth-time; and if you put down its memories once, you can find no second growth." My Aunt Tabithy was wrong. There is as much growth in the thoughts and feelings that run behind us as in those that run before us.
No, no, Aunt Tabithy; this life of musing does not exhaust so easily. It is like the springs on the farmland, that are fed with all the showers and the dews of the year, and that from the narrow fissures of the rock send up streams continually; or it is like the deep well in the meadow, where one may see stars at noon when no stars are shining.
My Aunt Tabithy nodded. Nor is this a mere bachelor fling against constancy. I can believe, Heaven knows, in an unalterable and unflinching affection, which neither desires nor admits the prospect of any other.
Let a week go by, and in some interval of care, as you recall the smile of a mother, or some pale sister who is dead, a new crowd of memories will rush upon your soul, and leave their traces in such tears as will make you kinder and better for days and weeks. I had touched my Aunt Tabithy: she had dropped a stitch in her knitting. I believe she was weeping.
These might be more or less tempting; but certainly if they were of a kind which I have attempted to portray in the characters of Bella, or of Carry, neither my Aunt Tabithy nor any one else should have learned such truth from any book of mine. There are griefs too sacred to be babbled to the world; and there may be loves which one would forbear to whisper even to a friend.
With my Aunt Tabithy. "Pshaw!" said my Aunt Tabithy, "have you not done with dreaming?" My Aunt Tabithy, though an excellent and most notable person, loves occasionally a quiet bit of satire. And when I told her that I was sharpening my pen for a new story of those dreamy fancies and half-experiences which lie grouped along the journeying hours of my solitary life, she smiled as if in derision.
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