“For weeks and months arter her death, I felt that I should go ravin’ distracted. I couldn’t realize that she was dead; oh! Sir, the world looked jist like a great dreadful prison to me. I stayed at her father’s, and for weeks I used to go once or twice a day to her tomb, and weep, and stay, and linger round, and the spot seemed sacred where she rested.
“Well, I stayed in Philadelphia some months arter this, and I tell ye I felt as though _my all_ was gone. I stood alone in the world, as desolate as could be, and I determined I never would agin try to git me a wife. It seemed to me I was jist like some old wreck, I’d seen on the shore.
A. “Peter, you make me think of Walter Scott’s description of Rhoderic Dhu, in his ‘Lady of the Lake.’
“‘As some tall ship, whose lofty prore, Shall never stem the billows more, Deserted by her gallant band, Amid the breakers lies astrand; So on his couch lay Rhoderic Dhu, And oft his feverish limbs he threw, In toss abrupt; as when her sides Lie rocking in the advancing tides That shake her frame with ceaseless beat But cannot heave her from her seat. Oh! how unlike her course on sea, Or his free step, on hill and lea.’
P. “Yis, Sir! I was jist like that same Rhoderic; what’de call him? Oh! I was _worse_, the world was a prison to me, and I wanted to lay my bones down at rest by the dust of Solena. I finally went back to New York, and stayed there for a while, and then up to New Haven, and stayed there two months, in Mr. Johnson’s family; and we used to board college students; and we had oceans of oysters and clams; and New Haven is by all odds the handsomest place I ever see in this country or in Europe; and finally I sailed back to New York, arter try in’ to bury my feelin’s in one way and another. But in all my wanderin’s, _I couldn’t forgit Solena_. She seemed to cling to me like life, and I’d spend hours and hours in thinkin’ about her, and I never used to think about her without tears.
“Well, I thought I would try to bury my feelin’s and forgit Solena, and so I hires out a year to Mr. Bronson, to drive hack, and arter I’d been with him a few months, I called up to Mr. Macy’s, my Quaker friend, and I felt kind’a bad to go there tu and not find Susan, for I had the biggest curiosity in the world to find out where she’d departed tu; but I thought I’d go and talk with the old folks, and see if they’d heard any thing about Susan.