,
a passenger by the Condor from Valparaiso, set foot upon his native shore,
and turned his face in the direction of Rockland, The Mountain, and the
mansion-house. He had heard something, from time to time, of his
New-England relatives, and knew that they were living together as he left
them. And so he heralded himself to "My dear Uncle" by a letter signed
"Your loving nephew, Richard Venner," in which letter he told a very frank
story of travel and mercantile adventure, expressed much gratitude for the
excellent counsel and example which had helped to form his character and
preserve him in the midst of temptation, inquired affectionately after his
uncle's health, was much interested to know whether his lively cousin who
used to be his playmate had grown up as handsome as she promised to be, and
announced his intention of paying his respects to them both at
Rockland. Not long after this came the trunks marked R.V. which he had sent
before him, forerunners of his advent: he was not going to wait for a reply
or an invitation.
What a sound that is,--the banging down of the preliminary trunk, without
its claimant to give it the life which is borrowed by all personal
appendages, so long as the owner's hand or eye is on them! If it announce
the coming of one loved and longed for, how we delight to look at it, to
sit down on it, to caress it in our fancies, as a lone exile walking out on
a windy pier yearns towards the merchantman lying along-side, with the
colors of his own native land at her peak, and the name of the port he
sailed from long ago upon her stern! But if it tell the near approach of
the undesired, inevitable guest, what sound short of the muffled noises
made by the undertakers as they turn the corners in the dim-lighted house,
with low shuffle of feet and whispered cautions, carries such a sense of
knocking-kneed collapse with it as the thumping down in the front entry of
the heavy portmanteau, rammed with the changes of uncounted coming weeks?
Whether the R.
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