"BretHarte-UrbanSketches" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harte Bret)

been detected lying awake, at times when he should have been asleep,
engaged in curiously comparing the bed-clothes, walls, and furniture
with some recollection of his youth. At such moments he has been
heard to sing softly to himself fragments of some unintelligible
composition, which probably still linger in his memory as the echoes
of a music he has long outgrown. He has the habit of receiving
strangers with the familiarity of one who had met them before, and
to whom their antecedents and peculiarities were matters of old
acquaintance, and so unerring is his judgment of their previous
character that when he withholds his confidence I am apt to withhold
mine. It is somewhat remarkable that while the maturity of his
years and the respect due to them is denied by man, his superiority
and venerable age is never questioned by the brute creation. The
dog treats him with a respect and consideration accorded to none
others, and the cat permits a familiarity which I should shudder to
attempt. It may be considered an evidence of some Pantheistic
quality in his previous education, that he seems to recognize a
fellowship even in inarticulate objects; he has been known to
verbally address plants, flowers, and fruit, and to extend his
confidence to such inanimate objects as chairs and tables. There can
be little doubt that, in the remote period of his youth, these
objects were endowed with not only sentient natures, but moral
capabilities, and he is still in the habit of beating them when they
collide with him, and of pardoning them with a kiss.

As he has grown older--rather let me say, as we have approximated
to his years--he has, in spite of the apparent paradox, lost much
of his senile gravity. It must be confessed that some of his
actions of late appear to our imperfect comprehension inconsistent
with his extreme age. A habit of marching up and down with a
string tied to a soda-water bottle, a disposition to ride anything
that could by any exercise of the liveliest fancy be made to assume
equine proportions, a propensity to blacken his venerable white
hair with ink and coal dust, and an omnivorous appetite which did
not stop at chalk, clay, or cinders, were peculiarities not
calculated to excite respect. In fact, he would seem to have become
demoralized, and when, after a prolonged absence the other day, he
was finally discovered standing upon the front steps addressing a
group of delighted children out of his limited vocabulary, the
circumstance could only be accounted for as the garrulity of age.

But I lay aside my pen amidst an ominous silence and the
disappearance of the venerable head from my plane of vision. As I
step to the other side of the table, I find that sleep has
overtaken him in an overt act of hoary wickedness. The very pages
I have devoted to an exposition of his deceit he has quietly
abstracted, and I find them covered with cabalistic figures and
wild-looking hieroglyphs traced with his forefinger dipped in ink,
which doubtless in his own language conveys a scathing commentary
on my composition. But he sleeps peacefully, and there is