THE OLDEST INHABITANT.

BY REV. M. G. WATKINS, M.A.

LIFE has two points which, according to their temperament, specially attract the attention of the thoughtful. Infancy and old age possess charms of anticipation and experience far more interesting to reflective minds than the chequered struggles of manhood. A hopeful character dwells with imaginative pleasure on the untracked sea which opens before the babe; men of a graver cast of mind, on the contrary, love to contemplate the weather-beaten hulls and torn rigging of the vessels which have almost completed their life-voyage, and are nearing the breakers which edge the eternal shore beyond. So the Fathers moralized on the cries which a new-born child utters, vague prophecies, as they regarded them, of the tears and troubles of its future years; and Herodotus tells us of a Scythian tribe which was plunged into grief at the birth of an infant, through sad forebodings of what it would have to go through, while they rejoiced when death carried off one of their numbers, as having escaped, full of years and experience, from a toilsome world. The same characters, however, often take these different views of life according to their own years. The young are thus, by an impulse which commends itself as a wise provision of nature, irresistibly attracted towards mature age, while the old love to divert their minds from the matter-of-fact realities of their everyday existence to the purple dreamland which smiles so alluringly before youthful hopes. Certain it is that either my temperament or my time of life leads me to look with much delight on a green and genial old age. Nothing pleases me more than to light upon "the oldest inhabitant" in a retired village, where moss has grown over all the customs and characters of the past, and in his company to listen to old-world stories, and dim, half-forgotten legends galvanized to a precarious vitality by my sympathizing attention. The past possesses a charm, which present events fail 1 Cf. too the beautiful lines of Lucretius, v. 223-235, especially 227:Vagituque locum lugubri complet, ut æquum est, Quoi tantum in vita restet transire malorum." D

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to acquire, to one who in these busy days can afford to spend a sunny half-hour in chatting with time-honoured eld. Perhaps, like mercy, a few minutes thus spent may bless him who gives and him who takes. No more congenial subject can be broached to an old man than events in which he has been an actor. When the current of life is floating by him so rapidly, it is a charity to suffer him to drift into a quiet backwater, and there for a brief space to let him calmly survey scenes through which he has passed.

He

But too often "the oldest inhabitant" of a place is a myth, the creature of newspapers and common reports rather than an actually existing individual. It is needless to say that in this form we have no sympathy whatever with the fiction. appeals to the inventive faculties of a needy journalist rather than to the generous feelings of humanity in the abstract. Thus villages which have sprung up round junctions and refreshment stations on new lines of railway cannot possibly possess an old inhabitant. It is melancholy to think of their long lines of uniform brick tenements, where not even a ghost can be found. There ought always to be a big house, tenanted by an ancient family, in a village which can reasonably be supposed to have reared an "oldest inhabitant." Whenever the

wayfarer sees its gables, shadowed by elms, the home of cawing rooks, and a pinfold or pair of stocks in the market-place, he may be as certain that the "oldest inhabitant" is not far off as the voyager was who concluded that the shore on which he was wrecked must be civilized because the first object that met his eyes was the gallows. We shall not lightly believe, even on the authority of statistics and census returns, that large manufacturing towns such as Glasgow or Birmingham are capable of producing such an entity as an "oldest inhabitant." The whirr of looms and rattle of steam-engines are inimical to his healthy development. No one need look for him in the colonies. In savage communities he is generally devoured before he attains the fulness of his powers, the sagacity of his foresight being supposed by his kinsmen to betoken something of diabolical agency, after our own Milton's notion that

"Old experience doth attain

To something of prophetic strain."

In France, again, and on the Continent generally, the "oldest inhabitant" degenerates into a flaneur or habitué.

He sips

absinthe, and lives on small-talk and such scraps of political gossip as a paternal government drops benignly under its table. You see him creeping under the linden trees, or watching a game of dominoes, silent, sullen, unsympathetic. His generation is fast dying around him, and with the philosophical theories and Napoleonic ideas of younger heads he cannot keep pace. He feels an Ichabod amongst men, the glory of his life is departing. Before he reaches the dignity of an "old inhabitant," and men of mature years, like children of a later growth, can prattle round his knees, he takes a debauch of escargots, deposits a writing in the heel of his left shoe to the effect that life is a burden to the wise man, lights his charcoal stove, and, charivari in hand, calmly shuffles off this mortal coil.

This lamentable ending to the French ancien suggests that in old countries of settled political institutions alone, and specially in England, Scotland, and Scandinavia, the conditions exist under which "the oldest inhabitant" can be generated. He is the offspring of the grey-lichened years of peace and prosperity, and must be sought in the bosom of the primeval hills, by the shore of the sea which for centuries has seen no invader land on it, as far as may be from the rush of the express and the newly rescued acres, where high farming and steam husbandry revolutionize the bucolic mind. In some such haunts as Longfellow ascribes to the spirit of the woods, or Wordsworth paints as the favourite resort of the poet, he is to be found. Yet the "oldest inhabitant" is genial and fond of society, no misanthrope, spiteful and morose. He does not declaim against Government in an angry spirit, though he may decry its present administrators and sigh for the days of Pitt, (indeed, it is essential to his character that he be a "laudator temporis acti se puero"); nor is he rancorous against individuals, full of grudges to time and fate, but rather amiably contented with his lot.

To merit the appellation of "oldest inhabitant," in its best and truest sense, he must be one who has seen and done much in his own sphere (though that may be an humble one), one to whom a consciousness of work accomplished and duties fulfilled, not without honour, has brought an abiding peace, a disposition kindly affectioned towards all men. There must, too, be in him a feeling of pleasure at the simple sights and sounds of country and domestic life, a delight in homely pursuits suitable to his age, a fondness for children and all young life, and, above all, a due perception of the great realities of the next world, which

are necessarily closer to him than to others. He, and he alone, is our ideal "oldest inhabitant." The undying fish of Bowscale Tarn is no fit simile for him; nor is he to be compared with Tithonus, roaming disconsolate in the scenes of a youth that has long since died out. He is sociable, and expands to kindness as the anemone, fixed in the rift of rock, opens his disc to welcome the coming tide. Perhaps a few sentences of Swift on those undying creatures, the Struldbrugs, whom Gulliver discovered on his travels, will best describe what our "oldest inhabitant" is not:-"When they come to fourscore years they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection. Those objects against which their envy seems principally directed are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old." Our "oldest inhabitant" softens towards his neighbours, partly from his well-mellowed disposition, partly because the light of another world is fast breaking over the horizon in front of him.

It is a contradiction in terms to discover more than one "oldest inhabitant" in a place, though two or three may, in their own opinion, have just claims to that dignity. It may well be, however, that they advance their pretensions more with an eye to the succession than to the immediate dispossession of the man in office. These expectants are generally found in sunny nooks or shady corners, according to the season of the year, forming a little court round the man they revere. They are eminently Conservative; the greatest Liberal amongst them never upholds reform in any shape (except an advance of wages), but merely "hopes it may do no harm," instead of sternly condemning it with his fellow-counsellors. When they thus deliberate on public affairs, their walking-sticks are borne with as much dignity, and waved with as emphatic an effect, as the batons or sceptres of more elevated personages. Homer has left us a beautiful picture of the fraternity as it appeared a thousand years B.C. at Troy. The "oldest inhabitant" there was no less a personage than Priam himself, and the old men, his juniors, sit in the seat of the elders, utter their "lily-like" voice (if the reader can translate the original word better he is at liberty to adopt it), and gently moralize over the beauty of Helen. John of Gaunt, "time-honoured Lancaster," is another "oldest inhabitant" of exalted rank. But in modern times the type is deve

loped with the greatest exactness among the humbler ranks of life. In maritime localities he is the most weather-beaten among the old sea-dogs who smoke their pipes at the pier-head. Often he is the most crafty among the fishermen of the port. In small seaside villages a smuggler, once notable for daring and success, will frequently hold the office by undisputed right; he has literally fought his way to it. He may be a retired man-of-war's man, or soldier, one who has seen as many men and cities as Ulysses of old, and who fights his battles over again every evening (wind and weather permitting) at the life-boat station, to his admiring compeers; or if too unseasonable for outdoor colloquies, will readily adjourn with them to the "Three Jolly Herrings." One of these worthies once informed us that he had all the records of the village-very valuable documents-in his possession. On our modestly asking whether they went as far back as Queen Anne, he replied, with a look that annihilated us, "Why, bless 'ee, zur, they do go back to the time of Juley Cæsar!" Unluckily, we had no opportunity of examining them. On our pointing out a house facing the sea with stars engraved on the chimneys, he told us the Starre family once owned it, and they landed from the wreck of the Armada (it was on the Devonshire coast that this "oldest inhabitant" lived). In such historical and genealogical scraps the "oldest inhabitant" deals, scorning somewhat, it may be, the use of any very exact method in his narrative, and repudiating chronology as taught in books, but often relating to his hearer some interesting bit of folklore or half-forgotten old-world anecdote, which can be accredited only by the sincerity of the utterer.

Passing now to the "oldest inhabitant" of inland districts, he is to be discovered most readily in rustic villages, buried in a leafy seclusion amongst the hills, far from railroads and the busy scenes of commerce. Often very often-the parson is a worthy embodiment of the abstraction; oftener still, perhaps, it is his clerk. In a Scotch village, indeed, the "dominie" has almost a monopoly of the office. From his constantly assisting at the devotions of the living and the obsequies of the dead, the parish clerk acquires a moralizing disposition, prone to ramble into disquisitions on the past worthies of the place, and frequently indulging in half-serious, half-comic flights, such as the grave-diggers in "Hamlet" fall into, a strain which seems habitual to persons intimately connected with mortality in its last sombre scenes. In one village a gardener, the Andrew Fair