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Updated: June 10, 2025
She shut the door carefully behind her. Mr. Pepper labored frantically with the pipe. "No use to shake it any more till you get the hammer," advised Keziah. "Might's well talk while you're waitin'. What was it you wanted to tell me?" Abishai drew one hand across his forehead, leaving a decorative smooch of blacking on his perspiring countenance.
But what we must preserve of it were certain rules of life and moral diet, not exactly expressed in the document, but which, as it were, on its being duly received into Septimius's mind, were precipitated from the rich solution, and crystallized into diamonds, and which he found to be the moral dietetics, so to speak, by observing which he was to achieve the end of earthly immortality, whose physical nostrum was given in the recipe which, with the help of Doctor Portsoaken and his Aunt Keziah, he had already pretty satisfactorily made out.
As the absorbed young man gazed through the lonely nights at his beloved liquor, he fancied sometimes that he could see wonderful things in the crystal sphere of the vase; as in Doctor Dee's magic crystal used to be seen, which now lies in the British Museum; representations, it might be, of things in the far past, or in the further future, scenes in which he himself was to act, persons yet unborn, the beautiful and the wise, with whom he was to be associated, palaces and towers, modes of hitherto unseen architecture, that old hall in England to which he had a hereditary right, with its gables, and its smooth lawn; the witch-meetings in which his ancestor used to take part; Aunt Keziah on her death-bed; and, flitting through all, the shade of Sibyl Dacy, eying him from secret nooks, or some remoteness, with her peculiar mischievous smile, beckoning him into the sphere.
Old Stephen had something to say about this, and preferred to put it as a contradiction to Keziah. "Na-ay, na-ay, wife! O'or Gwen can guess a lady, by tokens, as well as thou or I. Tha-at be the story of it. Some la-ady that's coom by ill-luck in her o'ald age, and no friend to hand. She'm gotten a friend now, and a good one!"
I tell you, Keziah, that time when I first saw a real hope of gettin' you, that time after I'd learned from John that that big trouble of yours was out of the way forever, on my way up to Boston in the cars I made myself a promise I swore that if you did say yes to me I'd do my best to make the rest of your life as smooth and pleasant as the past so far had been rough.
But Ellery knew and she knew he knew, so the affection and mutual esteem between the two deepened. He called her "Aunt Keziah" at her request and she continued to call him "John." This was in private, of course; in public he was "Mr. Ellery" and she "Mrs. Coffin." In his walks about town he saw nothing of Grace. She and Mrs.
These, except for some murmurings, some groanings and unintelligible whisperings, were the last utterances of poor Aunt Keziah, who did not live a great while longer, and at last passed away in a great sigh, like a gust of wind among the trees, she having just before stretched out her hand again and grasped that of Septimius; and he sat watching her and gazing at her, wondering and horrified, touched, shocked by death, of which he had so unusual a terror, and by the death of this creature especially, with whom he felt a sympathy that did not exist with any other person now living.
But his open-air life had done him good in many ways. His uncle smiled, and told him he had grown to be a very son of Anak, and that he was as brown as a gipsy; whilst his cousins looked at him with furtive admiration, and Keziah could almost have wept that Cherry was not there to welcome him.
Even at Come-Outers' meeting, when Ezekiel Bassett hinted at a "just punishment fallin' on the head of the leader of the Pharisees," Thoph Black rose and defended Ellery. Keziah Coffin was, perhaps, the one person most disturbed by her parson's heroism. She would have gone to the shanty immediately had not Dr. Parker prevented.
There was brown bread toast, too; and fried ham and eggs, and moor honey, and Yorkshire tea-cakes. In the middle of the table Keziah had placed a large punch-bowl, filled with roses. And all the dogs were on the hearth, and they all had tea with us. After tea we tried to talk, but were so sleepy that the words died away on our heavy lips. So we took Keziah's advice and went to bed.
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