Peter Cannon writes that "The Terrible Old Man" is "little more than a polemic against the intrusion of people he regarded as 'foreigners,' that is, the non-English immigrants who came in the nineteenth century as cheap labor to fill the factories of an increasingly industrialized America."
As stories go, it's not much. But the Terrible Old Man himself is quite a character. He is said to have captained an East India clipper ship. He has a collection of fantastic stone idols in his yard, and he talks to bottles. This last invention is fascinating and a little creepy. The terrible old man sits at a table and talks to bottles and addresses the bottles by peculiar names and nicknames. The bottles seem to respond to the terrible old man by subtle movements of lead pendulums inside the bottles. What a fantastic device.
Even if the story wasn't that deep, the character could be used in other stories, and the pendulum spirit bottles are an inspired prop... and pretty fun to play with.
On a side note, I had to look up a word from this story: messrs.
Messrs. is plural of Mr.
Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terrible_Old_Man
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