Chapter 55

Chapter 55
A Vendetta and Other Things

DURING my three days' stay in the town, I woke up every morning
with the impression that I was a boy--for in my dreams the faces
were all young again, and looked as they had looked in the old times--
but I went to bed a hundred years old, every night--for meantime I
had been seeing those faces as they are now.

Of course I suffered some surprises, along at first,
before I had become adjusted to the changed state of things.
I met young ladies who did not seem to have changed at all;
but they turned out to be the daughters of the young ladies
I had in mind--sometimes their grand-daughters. When you
are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is
nothing surprising about it; but if, on the contrary, she is
a person whom you knew as a little girl, it seems impossible.
You say to yourself, 'How can a little girl be a grandmother.'
It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you
have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still,
in that matter.

I noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women,
not the men. I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly;
but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing
to be good.

There was a saddler whom I wished to see; but he was gone.
Dead, these many years, they said. Once or twice a day,
the saddler used to go tearing down the street, putting on his
coat as he went; and then everybody knew a steamboat was coming.
Everybody knew, also, that John Stavely was not expecting anybody
by the boat--or any freight, either; and Stavely must have known
that everybody knew this, still it made no difference to him;
he liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousand
tons of saddles by this boat, and so he went on all his life,
enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receipt
for those saddles, in case by any miracle they should come.
A malicious Quincy paper used always to refer to this town, in derision
as 'Stavely's Landing.' Stavely was one of my earliest admirations;
I envied him his rush of imaginary business, and the display
he was able to make of it, before strangers, as he went flying
down the street struggling with his fluttering coat.

But there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero. He was a mighty liar,
but I did not know that; I believed everything he said. He was a romantic,
sentimental, melodramatic fraud, and his bearing impressed me with awe.
I vividly remember the first time he took me into his confidence. He was
planing a board, and every now and then he would pause and heave a deep sigh;
and occasionally mutter broken sentences--confused and not intelligible--