In this awkward dilemma I found it sovereign. I rattled off some of my most excellent absurdities. All were willing to be relieved, at any expense of reason, from the pressure of the intolerable vacuum which had succeeded to the morning bustle. I have been at my old friend's various times since. I do not know a visiting place where every guest is so perfectly at his ease, nowhere, where harmony is so strangely the result of confusion.
Every body is at cross purposes, yet the effect is so much better than uniformity.
Yet somehow the old house is not quite what it should be. The Admiral still enjoys his pipe, but he has no Miss Emily to fill it for him. The instrument stands where it stood, but she is gone, whose delicate touch could sometimes for a short minute appease the warring elements. He bears bravely up, but he does not come out with his flashes of wild wit so thick as sea songs seldomer escape him. His wife, too, looks as if she wanted some younger body to scold and set to rights.