Prue and I | Page 9

pass like summer clouds, Aurelia, and the children of
yesterday are the wives and mothers of to-day. Even I do sometimes
discover the mild eyes of my Prue fixed pensively upon my face, as if
searching for the bloom which she remembers there in the days, long
ago, when we were young. She will never see it there again, any more
than the flowers she held in her hand, in our old spring rambles. Yet the
tear that slowly gathers as she gazes, is not grief that the bloom has
faded from my cheek, but the sweet consciousness that it can never
fade from my heart; and as her eyes fall upon her work again, or the
children climb her lap to hear the old fairy tales they already know by
heart, my wife Prue is dearer to me than the sweetheart of those days
long ago.

MY CHATEAUX.
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree."
_Coleridge._
I am the owner of great estates. Many of them lie in the West; but the
greater part are in Spain. You may see my western possessions any
evening at sunset when their spires and battlements flash against the
horizon.
It gives me a feeling of pardonable importance, as a proprietor, that

they are visible, to my eyes at least, from any part of the world in
which I chance to be. In my long voyage around the Cape of Good
Hope to India (the only voyage I ever made, when I was a boy and a
supercargo), if I fell home-sick, or sank into a reverie of all the pleasant
homes I had left behind, I had but to wait until sunset, and then looking
toward the west, I beheld my clustering pinnacles and towers brightly
burnished as if to salute and welcome me.
So, in the city, if I get vexed and wearied, and cannot find my wonted
solace in sallying forth at dinner-time to contemplate the gay world of
youth and beauty hurrying to the congress of fashion,--or if I observe
that years are deepening their tracks around the eyes of my wife, Prue, I
go quietly up to the housetop, toward evening, and refresh myself with
a distant prospect of my estates. It is as dear to me as that of Eton to the
poet Gray; and, if I sometimes wonder at such moments whether I shall
find those realms as fair as they appear, I am suddenly reminded that
the night air may be noxious, and descending, I enter the little parlor
where Prue sits stitching, and surprise that precious woman by
exclaiming with the poet's pensive enthusiasm;
"Thought would destroy their Paradise, No more;--where ignorance is
bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise."
Columbus, also, had possessions in the West; and as I read aloud the
romantic story of his life, my voice quivers when I come to the point in
which it is related that sweet odors of the land mingled with the sea-air,
as the admiral's fleet approached the shores; that tropical birds flew out
and fluttered around the ships, glittering in the sun, the gorgeous
promises of the new country; that boughs, perhaps with blossoms not
all decayed, floated out to welcome the strange wood from which the
craft were hollowed. Then I cannot restrain myself, I think of the
gorgeous visions I have seen before I have even undertaken the journey
to the West, and I cry aloud to Prue:
"What sun-bright birds, and gorgeous blossoms, and celestial odors will
float out to us, my Prue, as we approach our western possessions!"
The placid Prue raises her eyes to mine with a reproof so delicate that it
could not be trusted to words; and, after a moment, she resumes her
knitting and I proceed.
These are my western estates, but my finest castles are in Spain. It is a
country famously romantic, and my castles are all of perfect

proportions, and appropriately set in the most picturesque situations. I
have never been to Spain myself, but I have naturally conversed much
with travellers to that country; although, I must allow, without deriving
from them much substantial information about my property there. The
wisest of them told me that there were more holders of real estate in
Spain than in any other region he had ever heard of, and they are all
great proprietors. Every one of them possesses a multitude of the
stateliest castles. From conversation with them you easily gather that
each one considers his own castles much the largest and in the loveliest
positions. And, after I had heard this said, I verified it, by discovering
that all my immediate neighbors in the city were great Spanish
proprietors.
One day as I raised my head from entering some long and tedious