The thing that most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have
been described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could
truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him
accused of it before. "Oh, yes," he said, "I am a little hard of hearing
on one side. But it isn't deafness."
He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make
themselves painfully or inconveniently evident. He carried his slight
figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure.
Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something
that was said, and "They will shrink, you know," he added, as if he were
not at all concerned in the fact himself. If you met him in the street,
you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a
clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary
frown of his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well
gloved, in a silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he
did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think
it was kind to spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at
any rate, I am glad of the times when I did so. In society he had the
same vagueness, the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make
sure of you, he was as vivid as ever in his life. He made me think of a
bed of embers on which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when
these are breathed away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the
freshness of a newly kindled fire.
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