Edward Fane's Rosebud

From "Twice Told Tales"

There is hardly a more difficult exercise of fancy, than, while gazing
at a figure of melancholy age, to re-create its youth, and, without
entirely obliterating the identity of form and features, to restore
those graces which time has snatched away. Some old people,
especially women, so age-worn and woful are they, seem never to have
been young and gay. It is easier to conceive that such gloomy
phantoms were sent into the world as withered and decrepit as we
behold them now, with sympathies only for pain and grief, to watch at
death-beds, and weep at funerals. Even the sable garments of their
widowhood appear essential to their existence; all their attributes
combine to render them darksome shadows, creeping strangely amid the
sunshine of human life. Yet it is no unprofitable task, to take one
of these doleful creatures, and set fancy resolutely at work to
brighten the dim eye, and darken the silvery locks, and paint the
ashen cheek with rose-color, and repair the shrunken and crazy form,
till a dewy maiden shall be seen in the old matron's elbow-chair. The
miracle being wrought, then let the years roll back again, each sadder
than the last, and the whole weight of age and sorrow settle down upon
the youthful figure.

Wrinkles and furrows, the handwriting of Time, may thus be deciphered,
and found to contain deep lessons of thought and feeling. Such profit
might be derived, by a skilful observer, from my much-respected
friend, the Widow Toothaker, a nurse of great repute, who has breathed
the atmosphere of sick-chambers and dying breaths these forty years.

See! she sits cowering over her lonesome hearth, with her gown and
upper petticoat drawn upward, gathering thriftily into her person the
whole warmth of the fire, which, now at nightfall, begins to dissipate
the autumnal chill of her chamber. The blaze quivers capriciously in
front, alternately glimmering into the deepest chasms of her wrinkled
visage, and then permitting a ghostly dimness to mar the outlines of
her venerable figure. And Nurse Toothaker holds a teaspoon in her
right hand, with which to stir up the contents of a tumbler in her
left, whence steams a vapory fragrance, abhorred of temperance
societies. Now she sips,--now stirs,--now sips again. Her sad old
heart has need to be revived by the rich infusion of Geneva, which is
mixed half and half with hot water, in the tumbler. All day long she
has been sitting by a death-pillow, and quitted it for her home, only
when the spirit of her patient left the clay and went homeward too.
But now are her melancholy meditations cheered, and her torpid blood
warmed, and her shoulders lightened of at least twenty ponderous
years, by a draught from the