anations," I admitted impartially, "although we each
think there is but one. I will agree that yours is more entertaining.
Jannie was jealous again. The Roman orgies, the young person from the
_grands boulevards_, were more than she could accept; and she tried, in
the vocabulary lately so prevalent, a reprisal. But I must acknowledge
that I am surprised at the persistent masculine flexibility of Stepan."

"It was at the next sitting," McGeorge concluded, "that Stepan
announced the wedding of Ena and me. The spirits awaited it. There was a
row in the Meeker circle; but he dissolved, and refused to materialize
in any form until it was accomplished."

"To the music of the spheres," I added, with some attempt at ordinary
decency.

THE CENTENARIAN[15]

[Note 15: Copyright, 1919, by Harper & Brothers. Copyright, 1920, by
Will E. Ingersoll.]

BY WILL E. INGERSOLL

From _Harper's Magazine_

There were few who knew--and, frankly, there were few who seemed to care
to know--what Old Dalton meant when he mumbled, in his aspirate and
toothless quest for expression of the thoughts that doddered through his
misty old brain, "Thay wur-rld luks diff'rent now--all diff'rent now,
yagh!" Sometimes he would go on, after a pause, in a kind of laborious
elucidation: "Na, na! Ma there, now, she's gone. I--egh, egh--I went to
school 'long of her; an' et didn't matter so much, mun, about th' rest
going, 's long as she wer' here. But now--she's gone, ey. Agh-m! Ey, now
she's gone-like, an' th' ain't nobody to help me keep--keep a-hold o'
things. I'm a hundred years old, mun. Agh-m! You wouldn't--you wouldn't
know what I was meanin', now, when I tell you this here world has growed
all yellow-like, this month back. Ey, that's it, mun--all queer-like.
Egh, it's time I was movin' on--movin' on."

Part of this monologue--a very small part--was Old Dalton's own,
repeated over and over, and so kept in mind ever since the more
initiative years a decade ago when he first began to think about his
age. Another part of the utterance--more particularly that about "movin'
on"--consisted of scraps of remarks that had been addressed to him,
which he had hoarded up as an ape lays away odds and ends, and which he
repeated, parrotlike, when the sun and his pipe warmed Old Dalton into
speech. But that idea that the earth was growing yellow--that was a
recent uncanny turn of his fancy, his own entirely.

He was pretty well past having any very defi