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Titbottom sauntered into the hall towards midnight, wrapped in the gorgeous flowers of
his dressing-gown, and with his hands buried in the pockets, as usual. There was great
excitement, and immense deprecation of gubernatorial ire. But it happened that the
governor and my grandfather were old friends, and there was no offense. But as they
were conversing together, one of the distressed managers cast indignant glances at the
brilliant costume of my grandfather, who summoned him, and asked courteously:
"'Did you invite me or my coat?'
"'You, in a proper coat,' replied the manager.
"The governor smiled approvingly, and looked at my grandfather.
"'My friend," said he to the manager, 'I beg your pardon, I forgot.'
"The next day my grandfather was seen promenading in full ball dress along the streets of
the little town.
"'They ought to know,' said he, 'that I have a proper coat, and that not contempt nor
poverty, but forgetfulness, sent me to a ball in my dressing-gown.'
"He did not much frequent social festivals after this failure, but he always told the story
with satisfaction and a quiet smile.
"To a stranger, life upon those little islands is uniform even to weariness. But the old
native dons like my grandfather ripen in the prolonged sunshine, like the turtle upon the
Bahama banks, nor know of existence more desirable. Life in the tropics I take to be a
placid torpidity. During the long, warm mornings of nearly half a century, my grandfather
Titbottom had sat in his dressing-gown and gazed at the sea. But one calm June day, as
he slowly paced the piazza after breakfast, his dreamy glance was arrested by a little
vessel, evidently nearing the shore. He called for his spyglass, and surveying the craft,
saw that she came from the neighboring island. She glided smoothly, slowly, over the
summer sea. The warm morning air was sweet with perfumes, and silent with heat. The
sea sparkled languidly, and the brilliant blue hung cloudlessly over. Scores of little island
vessels had my grandfather seen come over the horizon, and cast anchor in the port.
Hundreds of summer mornings had the white sails flashed and faded, like vague faces
through forgotten dreams. But this time he laid down the spyglass, and leaned against a
column of the piazza, and watched the vessel with an intentness that he could not explain.
She came nearer and nearer, a graceful spectre in the dazzling morning.
"'Decidedly I must step down and see about that vessel,' said my grandfather Titbottom.
"He gathered his ample dressing-gown about him, and stepped from the piazza with no
other protection from the sun than the little smoking cap upon his head. His face wore a
calm, beaming smile, as if he approved of all the world. He was not an old man, but there
was almost a patriarchal pathos in his expression as he sauntered along in the sunshine
towards the shore. A group of idle gazers was collected to watch the arrival. The little
vessel furled her sails and drifted slowly landward, and as she was of very light draft, she
came close to the shelving shore. A long plank was put out from her side, and the
debarkation commenced. My grandfather Titbottom stood looking on to see the
passengers descend. There were but a few of them, and mostly traders from the
neighboring island. But suddenly the face of a young girl appeared over the side of the
vessel, and she stepped upon the plank to descend. My grandfather Titbottom instantly
advanced, and moving briskly reached the top of the plank at the same moment, and with
the old tassel of his cap flashing in the sun, and one hand in the pocket of his dressing
gown, with the other he handed the young lady carefully down the plank. That young
lady was afterwards my grandmother Titbottom.
"And so, over the gleaming sea which he had watched so long, and which seemed thus to
reward his patient gaze, came his bride that sunny morning.
"'Of course we are happy,' he used to say: 'For you are the gift of the sun I have loved so
long and so well.' And my grandfather Titbottom would lay his hand so tenderly upon the
golden hair of his young bride, that you could fancy him a devout Parsee caressing
sunbeams.
"There were endless festivities upon occasion of the marriage; and my grandfather did
not go to one of them in his dressing-gown. The gentle sweetness of his wife melted
every heart into love and sympathy. He was much older than she, without doubt. But age,
as he used to say with a smile of immortal youth, is a matter of feeling, not of years. And
if, sometimes, as she sat by his side upon the piazza, her fancy looked through her eyes
upon that summer sea and saw a younger lover, perhaps some one of those graceful and
glowing heroes who occupy the foreground of all young maidens' visions by the sea, yet
she could not find one more generous and gracious, nor fancy one more worthy and
loving than my grandfather Titbottom. And if in the moonlit midnight, while he lay
calmly sleeping, she leaned out of the window and sank into vague reveries of sweet
possibility, and watched the gleaming path of the moonlight upon the water, until the
dawn glided over it--it was only that mood of nameless regret and longing, which
underlies all human happiness,--or it was the vision of that life of society, which she had
never seen, but of which she had often read, and which looked very fair and alluring
across the sea to a girlish imagination which knew that it should never know that reality.
"These West Indian years were the great days of the family," said Titbottom, with an air
of majestic and regal regret, pausing and musing in our little parlor, like a late Stuart in
exile, remembering England. Prue raised her eyes from her work, and looked at him with
a subdued admiration; for I have observed that, like the rest of her sex, she has a singular
sympathy with the representative of a reduced family. Perhaps it is their finer perception
which leads these tender-hearted women to recognize the divine right of social
superiority so much more readily than we; and yet, much as Titbottom was enhanced in
my wife's admiration by the discovery that his dusky sadness of nature and expression
was, as it were, the expiring gleam and late twilight of ancestral splendors, I doubt if Mr.
Bourne would have preferred him for bookkeeper a moment sooner upon that account. In
truth, I have observed, down town, that the fact of your ancestors doing nothing is not
considered good proof that you can do anything. But Prue and her sex regard sentiment
more than action, and I understand easily enough why she is never tired of hearing me
read of Prince Charlie. If Titbottom had been only a little younger, a little handsomer, a
little more gallantly dressed--in fact, a little more of the Prince Charlie, I am sure her eyes
would not have fallen again upon her work so tranquilly, as he resumed his story.
"I can remember my grandfather Titbottom, although I was a very young child, and he
was a very old man. My young mother and my young grandmother are very distinct
figures in my memory, ministering to the old gentleman, wrapped in his dressing-gown,
and seated upon the piazza. I remember his white hair and his calm smile, and how, not
long before he died, he called me to him, and laying his hand upon my head, said to me:
"My child, the world is not this great sunny piazza, nor life the fairy stories which the
women tell you here as you sit in their laps. I shall soon be gone, but I want to leave with
you some memento of my love for you, and I know nothing more valuable than these
spectacles, which your grandmother brought from her native island, when she arrived
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