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