My nearest neighbor hitherto has been a bachelor named Jacob Mariner. I called him my cuckoo, my rain-crow, because the sound of his voice awoke apprehensions of falling weather. A visit from him was an endless drizzle. For Jacob came over to expound his minute miseries; and had everything that he gave out on the subject of human ailments been written down, it must have made a volume as large, as solemn, and as inconvenient as a family Bible.
My other nearest neighbor lives across the road— a widow, Mrs. Walters. I call Mrs. Walters my mocking-bird, because she reproduces by what is truly a divine arrangement the voices of the town. When she flutters across to the yellow settee under the grape-vine and balances herself lightly with expectation, I have but to request that she favor me with a little singing, and soon the air is vocal with every note of the village songsters. This performance over, Mrs. Walters, with a motherly home-note, begins to fly around the subject of my symptoms, as though there were a large nestful of the helpless young things that must be set on at night, and kept properly fed during the day. But symptoms— so help me Heaven! I shall never have other than I was born with.
Naturally it has been my wish to bring about between cuckoo and mocking-bird the desire to pair with one another. For surely a marriage compact on the basis of such a passion ought to open up for them a union of ever-flowing and indestructible felicity. They should associate as perfectly as the compensating metals of a pendulum, of which the one contracts as the other expands, so that the clock goes on forever. And then I should be a little happier myself. But the perversity of life! Jacob would never confide in Mrs. Walters. Mrs. Walters would never inquire for Jacob.
Now poor Jacob is dead, of no complaint apparently, and with so few symptoms that even the doctors did not know what was the matter, and the upshot of this talk is that his place has been sold, and I am to have new neighbors. New neighbors— what a disturbance to a man living on the edge of a quiet town!