Uncle David told this yarn when he gave away the beautiful mirror. Nobody had ever before heard of this connection with the Schooner Hesperus. My own impression is that the mirror was brought to the old house, which I now own, by Aunt Betsey Larcom, the great grandmother of Elsie Doane. Dear old Uncle David! Sometimes his language was not choice, but how big his heart was! After he uncoiled his sea legs and settled down to teaming, mildly flavored with farming was there ever a more generous or a more kindly neighbor? People often cheated him, in fact, he almost seemed to like being cheated. His patient wife once remarked that he always wanted to give his own things away, and buy things for more than people asked for them. He would match Uncle Toby's army in Flanders for profanity, but he would go miles to help a sick friend, or, (and this is to my mind, the last test of friendship in a horse owner) turn out his old "Bun" on the stormiest night that ever raged, to help a brother teamster up a hill. And when were ever his own rakes and plows and forks at home? Weren't they always lent out somewhere? What a reverence for all things sacred, way down in the bottom of his large heart he always had! How deferential to _ministers_ he was! How angry he would be at any unnecessary breaking of the "_Sah-bath_" as he called it. How steadily he read, (though he wouldn't go to church) all day and all the evening of the Lord's Day--taking up his book at night, where he left it to feed his "critturs," and holding his sperm oil lamp in his hand as he finished his day of rest. Some of his expressions remain in my mind as, for instance "From July to Eternity," to indicate his weariness at something too much prolonged. He liked to exaggerate as well as Mark Twain did, as when he used to wish on a furiously stormy night, that he were way over on Half Way Rock, always being careful to have a _tremendous_ fire going, and a pitcher of cider at hand, before he expressed the desire. The memory of his good, religious father was always with him, and when he was in a particularly genial frame of mind, he would sing snatches of the old tunes he had heard his father sing:-- "The Lord into his garden comes The spices yield their rich "Perfooms" The lillies grow and thrive" was one of his special favorites. His kindly handsome face, his enormous size, his laugh, which was ten laughs in one, are among the clear remembrances of my childhood. And I can hardly close this sketch better than by quoting his old family doctor's words: "Swear, yes, but his swearing was better than some folks' praying."