Ere long, on the mountain side, he passed into an ancient natural wood, which seemed some way familiar, and midway in it, paused to contemplate a strange, mouldy pile, resting at one end against a sturdy beech.
Though wherever touched by his staff, however lightly, this pile would crumble, yet here and there, even in powder, it preserved the exact look, each irregularly defined line, of what it had originally been-namely, a half-cord of stout hemlock (one of the woods least affected by exposure to the air), in a foregoing generation chopped and stacked up on the spot, against sledging-time, but, as sometimes happens in such cases, by subsequent oversight, abandoned to oblivious decay-type now, as it stood there, of forever arrested intentions, and a long life still rotting in early mishap.
"Do I dream?" mused the bewildered old man, "or what is this vision that comes to me of a cold, cloudy morning, long, long ago, and I heaving yon elbowed log against the beech, then a sapling? Nay, nay, I cannot be so old."
"Come away, father, from this dismal, damp wood," said his son, and led him forth.
Blindly ranging to and fro, they next saw a man ploughing. Advancing slowly, the wanderer met him by a little heap of ruinous burnt masonry, like a tumbled chimney, what seemed the jams of the fire-place, now aridly stuck over here and there, with thin, clinging, round, prohibitory mosses, like executors' wafers. Just as the oxen were bid stand, the stranger's plough was hitched over sideways, by sudden contact with some sunken stone at the ruin's base.
"There, this is the twentieth year my plough has struck this old hearthstone. Ah, old man, — sultry day, this."
"Whose house stood here, friend?" said the wanderer, touching the half-buried hearth with his staff, where a fresh furrow overlapped it.
"Don't know; forget the name; gone West, though, I believe. You know 'em?"
But the wanderer made no response; his eye was now fixed on a curious natural bend or wave in one of the bemossed stone jambs.
"What are you looking at so, father?"
"'_Father_!' Here," raking with his staff, "_my_ father would sit, and here, my mother, and here I, little infant, would totter between, even as now, once again, on the very same spot, but in the unroofed air, I do. The ends meet. Plough away, friend."
Best followed now is this life, by hurrying, like itself, to a close.
Few things remain.
He was repulsed in efforts after a pension by certain caprices of law.
His scars proved his only medals. He dictated a little book, the record of his fortunes. But long ago it faded out of print-himself out of being-his name out of memory. He died the same day that the oldest oak on his native hills was blown down.
THE END.
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Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (Annotated Edition)
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