I have strayed from my subject; but a bold leap, and we are back again. See him there, sitting in his easy arm-chair, with the little black cap upon his head, to cover the work of time rather than the ravages of the razor, with the soft, silky locks, now almost snow-white, floating from underneath it, and the dark garments, never laid aside except when at rest, enveloping the whole figure. Yet what an air of calm and tranquil dignity in the very disposition of that figure, and in that mild, benignant face. Where are the cares and sorrows of life? What have anxious thought, and the arduous duties, well performed, of a laborious profession done in this case? Where are the pangs, the sicknesses, the wasting force of disease, the corporeal pains, the uneasy weakness of senility? They are not there. He rests in his chair as easily as a child—ay, and as gracefully too. Oh, the balm, the blessed balm, such as Gilead never knew, of a pure, high, and holy heart, which, preserving and refreshing continually the spirit that dwells within it, with that aromatic odor of the tree of life, imparts a portion of the sovereign antidote even to the frail form of clay, and guards it against the shock of time, or the wearying war of circumstances! Few of the impatient, the irritable, the passionate, the children of caprice, the slaves of vice, the hunters of excitement, ever see the age to which Father Bonneville had already attained, and those who do, reach it enfeebled, worn out, toil-broken, and shriveled up by the struggles, and the wanderings, and the difficult passes, and the burning suns, which they themselves have sought and found upon the way. Father Bonneville’s had been a quiet and a placid life—I know nothing of his history—I never heard it—but the part I speak of was written on his face. Father Bonneville’s had been a quiet and a placid life—I am quite sure of it: otherwise he could have never lived to be the calm, happy, benignant old man he was at sixty-three. On his face you hardly saw his age; for it was as smooth as a boy’s, but those white hairs, and the necessity of using spectacles now and then, betrayed the fact that he was not quite so young as he once had been. His teeth—I recollect them as they were even then, quite well—were beautifully white and even, but the old man used to say, that though he hoped his tongue was true, his mouth was an artful hypocrite; for it put its best arguments forward, and kept all that were worthless and unserviceable behind; in other words, that the front teeth might be good enough, but that those hard-working slaves of the stomach, the grinders, were gone—and this was, probably, the cause of his love of fish. Heaven bless the finny fellows! they are seldom, any of them, tough, and the worst one has to fear is a bone or an indigestion; though it is rather hard, I think, to be pulled out of a fresh stream, and put upon a gridiron.