The hair that was then dark and clustering, has become thin and grizzled--although, what is it to you, whether I am bald or wigged? The arm that was strongly knit and vigorous, is now weak and trembling--for which you don't care one farthing. The spirits, then so light and elastic that they danced half in air, in the merry breeze and jocund sunshine, over every happy undulation of the clear smooth swell of early life, are now dead and water-logged, like a swamped buoy that has been staved by the rough weather we all must look to meet with;--never to float again. My _Nelly_ was then Miss Helen Hudson, a happy laughing girl; she is now a little sharp-visaged anxious matron; her daughters growing up around her, and budding into womanhood, and her boys (for she has brought me a whole bushelful of small Brails), glorying in the exuberance of glee incidental to the spring of life, like so many young _what-do-ye-call ums_; for I am in a hurry to get done--and have no handy simile for the nonce. "Master Brail! Master Brail! you had better copy the parish register at once." Patience, my dear boy--Patience, we shall not long cross each other, for we are now about bearing up finally on our separate courses. Many of the friends I have lived amongst and loved, and whose heartstrings were in turn wound around me, have dropped, one by one, like seared leaves in autumn, into the narrow-house, whither we are all, at sea or on shore, fast journeying. As for me Benjie, when bowling along with all the canvass I could spread (sometimes more than I could well carry), before the cheerful breeze of prosperity, a sudden gust has, more than once, blown my swelling expectations out of the boltropes into ribbons, proving, by sore experience, that here below it is not a trade-wind; and not sudden squalls only, severe for the moment, but soon over; my strained bark has often been tossed by rough and continuous gales, so that, more than once, I have hardly escaped foundering. Periods of sickness and languishing have not been wanting, wherein the exhausted spirit has faintly exclaimed in the morning, "Would God it were evening!" and at evening, "Would God it were morning!"