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- 2642
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:47:56.336Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 2582
- text
- youthful incredulity, as to the plain theory, and still plainer fact of
death, hardly seems Christian. Advanced in years, as she knows she must
be, my wife seems to think that she is to teem on, and be inexhaustible
forever. She doesn't believe in old age. At that strange promise in
the plain of Mamre, my old wife, unlike old Abraham's, would not have
jeeringly laughed within herself.
Judge how to me, who, sitting in the comfortable shadow of my chimney,
smoking my comfortable pipe, with ashes not unwelcome at my feet,
and ashes not unwelcome all but in my mouth; and who am thus in a
comfortable sort of not unwelcome, though, indeed, ashy enough way,
reminded of the ultimate exhaustion even of the most fiery life; judge
how to me this unwarrantable vitality in my wife must come, sometimes,
it is true, with a moral and a calm, but oftener with a breeze and a
ruffle.
If the doctrine be true, that in wedlock contraries attract, by how
cogent a fatality must I have been drawn to my wife! While spicily
impatient of present and past, like a glass of ginger-beer she
overflows with her schemes; and, with like energy as she puts down
her foot, puts down her preserves and her pickles, and lives with
them in a continual future; or ever full of expectations both from
time and space, is ever restless for newspapers, and ravenous for
letters. Content with the years that are gone, taking no thought for
the morrow, and looking for no new thing from any person or quarter
whatever, I have not a single scheme or expectation on earth, save in
unequal resistance of the undue encroachment of hers.
Old myself, I take to oldness in things; for that cause mainly loving
old Montague, and old cheese, and old wine; and eschewing young people,
hot rolls, new books, and early potatoes and very fond of my old
claw-footed chair, and old club-footed Deacon White, my neighbor, and
that still nigher old neighbor, my betwisted old grape-vine, that of a
summer evening leans in his elbow for cosy company at my window-sill,
while I, within doors, lean over mine to meet his; and above all, high
above all, am fond of my high-mantled old chimney. But she, out of the
infatuate juvenility of hers, takes to nothing but newness; for that
cause mainly, loving new cider in autumn, and in spring, as if she
were own daughter of Nebuchadnezzar, fairly raving after all sorts of
salads and spinages, and more particularly green cucumbers (though all
the time nature rebukes such unsuitable young hankerings in so elderly
a person, by never permitting such things to agree with her), and has
an itch after recently-discovered fine prospects (so no graveyard be
in the background), and also after Swedenborganism, and the Spirit
Rapping philosophy, with other new views, alike in things natural and
unnatural; and immortally hopeful, is forever making new flower-beds
even on the north side of the house, where the bleak mountain wind
would scarce allow the wiry weed called hard-hack to gain a thorough
footing; and on the road-side sets out mere pipe-stems of young elms;
though there is no hope of any shade from them, except over the ruins
of her great granddaughter's gravestones; and won't wear caps, but
plaits her gray hair; and takes the Ladies' Magazine for the fashions;
and always buys her new almanac a month before the new year; and rises
at dawn; and to the warmest sunset turns a cold shoulder; and still
goes on at odd hours with her new course of history, and her French,
and her music; and likes a young company; and offers to ride young
colts; and sets out young suckers in the orchard; and has a spite
against my elbowed old grape-vine, and my club-footed old neighbor, and
my claw-footed old chair, and above all, high above all, would fain
persecute, until death, my high-mantled old chimney. By what perverse
magic, I a thousand times think, does such a very autumnal old lady
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- Chunk 9