Wizened

The wizened, old sorcerer took me under his wing and taught me everything he knew about magic.

An instant afterwards there appeared a little wizened fellow with a cringing manner and a shambling style of walking. He wore an open jacket, with a splotch of tar on the sleeve, a red-and-black check shirt, dungaree trousers, and heavy boots badly worn.

I had not been in my study five minutes when the maid entered to say that a person desired to see me. To my astonishment it was none other than my strange old book collector, his sharp, wizened face peering out from a frame of white hair, and his precious volumes, a dozen of them at least, wedged under his right arm.

A door suddenly flew open out of what appeared to be solid wall at the end of the corridor, and a little, wizened man darted out of it, like a rabbit out of its burrow.

The old man had a wizened face.

"Ill-fard, crazy, crack-brained gowk, that she is!" exclaimed the housekeeper. . . "If it hadna been that I am mair than half a gentlewoman by my station, I wad hae tried my ten nails in the wizen'd hide o' her!"

He was old, too, wizened with age, and the hair on his face was gray.

In the simple fable about old age reconciling itself to memory and destiny, Mastroianni wears the wizened smile of a man who knows he is visiting his youth for the last time.