Memoirs of John Adams Dix; comp. by his son, Morgan Dix.

8

MEMOIRS OF JOHN ADAMS DIX.

see the simple birds and fowls leaving their nests and roosts,
with the idea, no doubt, that they were waking up to a new day.
The next winter* death - thenceforth to be but too frequent a visitor-first appeared in our family. My grandfather lived near us. Two gardens, his own and my father's,
separated the two families; a broad gravelled walk ran through
the grounds, and our communications with each other were
carried on without going into the street. My great-grandfather, who lived with my grandfather, was near a hundred years
old; but until within a short period before his death he was
in full possession of his bodily and mental powers. His greatest weakness was the garrulousness of age. On Thanksgivingday the two families were always united, and four generations
sat down together at my father's table. A few weeks after
one of these reunions (the last we were to know) my grandfather came to our house at daybreak and told us the old man
was dead. His spirit had passed away in the stillness of the
night, and so quietly that my grandfather and grandmother,
who occupied the adjoining room, with a door open into his,
were unaware of it until they rose. The shock which the
intelligence gave to us children was indescribable. The presence of our aged ancestor, who moved about among us in
patriarchal solemnity, and to whom we clung like vines to a
tree of stately growth, seemed a part of our own existence;
and I could hardly understand at first how his life could be
taken away without violence to our own. I incline to think
this is a common feeling with children when Death for the
* I leave this as it stands, although there is undoubtedly a mistake.
The date of the total eclipse is correctly given by my father as 1806; but
the death of his great-grandfather occurred eighteen months before, and
not after, the eclipse. The error is a slight one; it probably arose from
the double impression made on the boy's mind by the shadow over the
earth and the deeper shadow in the house-li-he associated the two horrors
of great darkness with each other, as though they merged into one. And
it may also be noted that a death occurred just as he states-that of his
brother, in October, 1806.