“Bless my soul! Where have I seen something like that look before?”

After musing for some minutes, the old gentleman walked, with the same meditative face, into a dark ante-room opening from the yard; and there retiring into a corner, called up before his mind’s eye a vast amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for may years. “No,” said the old gentleman, shaking his head; “it must be imagination.”

He wandered over them again. He had called them into view, and it was not easy to replace the shroud that had so long concealed them. There were the faces of friends, and foes, and of many that had been almost strangers peering intrusively from the crowd; there were the faces of young and blooming girls that were now old women; there were faces that the grave had changed and closed upon, but which the mind, superior to its power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty, calling back the luster of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, the beaming of the soul through its mask of clay, and whispering of beauty beyond the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from the earth only to be set up as a light, to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to heaven.

But the old gentleman could recall no one countenance of which Oliver’s features bore a trace. So, he heaved a sigh over the recollections he had awakened; and being happily for himself, an absent old gentleman, buried them again in the pages of the musty book."