The latter part of the old female's communication of course occasioned a search. The pocket-book was found, and in it a paper covered with a close manuscript of a most curious character, but one that served to display the anatomy of poor Hugh Clifford's heart under his misfortunes more fully than it could have been laid open and read in either death-bed confession, or funeral sermon. It ran as follows:— "_A Soliloquy on my only faithful and never-failing friend,—my beloved and valued crooked stick._ "Ay, there thou art,—my own crooked stick!—My heart cleaves to thee, in thy crookedness; and I love thus to look upon thee, more and more, daily, as thou leanest by the wall in that corner,—remembering that thou and I were not always tenants of an alms-house. "I love to look upon thee, with a melancholy yet pleasurable love, beholding that thou preservest thy crooked identity,—yea, remainest as crooked as ever thou wert! I know not whether aught within me, or, indeed, any thing but thyself without me, be still the same as on that beautiful summer eve when, more than fifty years ago, I cut thee from the venerable crab-tree whereon thou didst grow, and we formed our inseparable friendship. "The wise men of this age would tell me that not a particle of the body I had then, at nineteen, is to be found in this old body of threescore and ten,—but that blood, bone, brains, and all its other youthful components, are changed. I know not, my dear crooked crab-stick, how truly they may speak; but this I know,—that I then was proud of a perfect and spotless array of teeth, while, now, my old gums are tenantless; that then my eyes were sharp and strong, while now I see, with the utmost difficulty, objects removed half a yard from my nose; that then my ears were instruments of use, and porches for receiving the brain's most precious visitants, the sounds of music,—while, now, they only serve to plague me when I see people's lips moving, and think, like other old fools, that folks are always talking about me; and, that I used to have 'a handsome head of hair,' as my barber always called it, on quarter-day, when he expected his salary,—while, now, I behold a perpetual winter above my brow, and on my brow itself! "But, ah! my faithful friend, why should I lament the changes which have come upon me? Fate, or Fortune, or whatever power I might fancifully charge with my evil day, cannot avenge herself of me so bitterly as she might,—if I had teeth to be set on edge with inferior food,—eyes to be offended with the rude shapes of this straw mattrass and rush-bottomed chair,—ears to be tormented with the jangling of earthen porringers, as the poor deaf old woman knocks them against each other,—and hair which I could not dress for lack of a mirror!