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A VENERABLE IMPOSTOR.
As I glance across my table, I am somewhat distracted
by the spectacle of a venerable head whose
crown occasionally appears beyond, at about its
level. The apparition of a very small hand—whose
fingers are bunchy and have the appearance of being
slightly webbed—which is frequently lifted above
the table in a vain and impotent attempt to reachthe
inkstand, always affects me as a novelty at each recurrence
of the phenomenon. Yet both the venerable
head and bunchy fingers belonged to an individual
with whom I am familiar, and to whom, for certain
reasons hereafter described, I choose to apply the
epithet written above this article.
His advent in the family was attended with peculiar
circumstances. He was received with some concern—the
number of retainers having been increased
by one in honor of his arrival. He appeared to be
weary—his pretence was that he had come from a
long journey—so that for days, weeks, and even
months, he did not leave his bed except when he was
carried. But it was remarkable that his appetite was
invariably regular and healthy, and that his meals,
which he required should be brought to him, were
with the family, his knowledge of our vernacular
being limited, but occasionally spoke to himself
in his own language—a foreign tongue. The
difficulties attending this eccentricity were obviated
by the young woman who had from the first taken
him under her protection—being, like the rest of her
sex, peculiarly open to impositions—and who at once
disorganized her own tongue to suit his. This was
effected by the contraction of the syllables of some
words, the addition of syllables to others, and an ingenious
disregard for tenses and the governing powers
of the verb. The same singular law which impels
people in conversation with foreigners to imitate their
broken English, governed the family in their communications
with him. He received these evidences
of his power with an indifference not wholly free
from scorn. The expression of his eye would occasionally
denote that his higher nature revolted from
them. I have no doubt myself that his wants were
frequently misinterpreted; that the stretching forth
of his hands toward the moon and stars might have
been the performance of some religious rite peculiar
to his own country, which was in ours misconstrued
into a desire for physical nourishment. His repetition
of the word “goo-goo”—which was subject to a
variety of opposite interpretations—when taken in
conjunction with his size, in my mind seemed to indicate
his aboriginal or Aztec origin.
I incline to this belief, as it sustains the impression
I have already hinted at, that his extreme youth is a
lived before at some remote period, and that his conduct
fully justifies his title as A Venerable Impostor.
A variety of circumstances corroborate this impression:
His tottering walk, which is a senile as well
as a juvenile condition; his venerable head, thatched
with such imperceptible hair that, at a distance, it
looks like a mild aureola, and his imperfect dental
exhibition. But beside these physical peculiarities
may be observed certain moral symptoms, which go
to disprove his assumed youth. He is in the habit
of falling into reveries, caused, I have no doubt, by
some circumstance which suggests a comparison
with his experience in his remoter boyhood, or by
some serious retrospection of the past years. He
has been detected lying awake, at times when he
should have been asleep, engaged in curiously comparing
the bed-clothes, walls and furniture with
some recollection of his youth. At such moments
he has been heard to sing softly to himself fragments
of some unintelligible composition, which probably
still linger in his memory as the echoes of a music
he has long outgrown. He has the habit of receiving
strangers with the familiarity of one who had
met them before, and to whom their antecedents and
peculiarities were matters of old acquaintance, and
so unerring is his judgment of their previous character
that when he withholds his confidence I am apt
to withhold mine. It is somewhat remarkable that
while the maturity of his years and the respect due
to them is denied by man, his superiority and venerable
The dog treats him with a respect and consideration
accorded to none others, and the cat permits a familiarity
which I should shudder to attempt. It may
be considered an evidence of some Pantheistic quality
in his previous education, that he seems to recognize
a fellowship even in inarticulate objects; he
has been known to verbally address plants, flowers
and fruit, and to extend his confidence to such inanimate
objects as chairs and tables. There can be
little doubt that, in the remote period of his youth,
these objects were endowed with not only sentient
natures but moral capabilities, and he is still in the
habit of beating them when they collide with him,
and of pardoning them with a kiss.
As he has grown older—rather let me say, as we
have approximated to his years—he has, in spite of
the apparent paradox, lost much of his senile gravity.
It must be confessed that some of his actions of late
appear to our imperfect comprehension inconsistent
with his extreme age. A habit of marching up and
down with a string tied to a soda-water bottle, a disposition
to ride anything that could by any exercise
of the liveliest fancy be made to assume equine proportions,
a propensity to blacken his venerable white
hair with ink and coal dust, and an omnivorous appetite
which did not stop at chalk, clay, or cinders,
were peculiarities not calculated to excite respect.
In fact, he would seem to have become demoralized,
and when, after a prolonged absence the other day,
he was finally discovered standing upon the front
his limited vocabulary, the circumstance could only
be accounted for as the garrulity of age.
But I lay aside my pen amidst an ominous silence
and the disappearance of the venerable head from
my plane of vision. As I step to the other side of
the table, I find that sleep has overtaken him in an
overt act of hoary wickedness. The very pages I
have devoted to an exposition of his deceit he has
quietly abstracted, and I find them covered with
cabalistic figures and wild-looking hieroglyphs traced
with his forefinger dipped in ink, which doubtless
in his own language conveys a scathing commentary
on my composition. But he sleeps peacefully, and
there is something in his face which tells me that he
has already wandered away to that dim reign of his
youth where I cannot follow him. And as there
comes a strange stirring at my heart when I contemplate
the immeasurable gulf which lies between us,
and how slight and feeble as yet is his grasp on this
world and its strange realities, I find too late that
I also am a willing victim of the Venerable Impostor.
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