Around his body was thrown the sheet of
the bed, and his fixed eye and haggard face gave him the appearance of a
being from another world. Even Katy and Caesar thought it was the spirit
of the elder Birch, and they fled the house, followed by the alarmed
Skinners in a body.
The excitement which had given the sick man strength, soon vanished, and
the peddler, lifting him in his arms, reconveyed him to his bed. The
reaction of the system which followed hastened to close the scene.
The glazed eye of the father was fixed upon the son; his lips moved, but
his voice was unheard. Harvey bent down, and, with the parting breath of
his parent, received his dying benediction. A life of privation, and of
wrongs, embittered most of the future hours of the peddler. But under no
sufferings, in no misfortunes, the subject of poverty and obloquy, the
remembrance of that blessing never left him; it constantly gleamed over
the images of the past, shedding a holy radiance around his saddest
hours of despondency; it cheered the prospect of the future with the
prayers of a pious spirit; and it brought the sweet assurance of having
faithfully discharged the sacred offices of filial love.
The retreat of Caesar and the spinster had been too precipitate to admit
of much calculation; yet they themselves instinctively separated from
the Skinners.
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