nument. This personage is the Register of Deeds. He is an
unemotional character, living in his business almost as exclusively as
the Scarabee, but without any of that eagerness and enthusiasm which
belong to our scientific specialist. His work is largely, principally,
I may say, mechanical. He has developed, however, a certain amount of
taste for the antiquities of his department, and once in a while brings
out some curious result of his investigations into ancient documents.
He too belongs to a dynasty which will last as long as there is such a
thing as property in land and dwellings. When that is done away with,
and we return to the state of villanage, holding our tenement-houses,
all to be of the same pattern, of the State, that is to say, of the
Tammany Ring which is to take the place of the feudal lord,--the office
of Register of Deeds will, I presume, become useless, and the dynasty
will be deposed.

As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things
and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much
they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone
twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of
his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we
had recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden
candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber. So it was the other day after
my reminiscences of the old gambrel-roofed house and its visitors. They
found an echo in the recollections of one of the brightest and liveliest
of my suburban friends, whose memory is exact about everything except
her own age, which, there can be no doubt, she makes out a score or two
of years more than it really is. Still she was old enough to touch some
lights--and a shadow or two--into the portraits I had drawn, which
made me wish that she and not I had been the artist who sketched the
pictures. Among the lesser regrets that mingle with graver sorrows for
the friends of an earlier generation we have lost, are our omissions to
ask them so many questions they could have answered easily enough, and
would have been pleased to be asked. There! I say to myself sometimes,
in an absent mood, I must ask her about that. But she of whom I am now
thinking has long been beyond the reach of any earthly questioning, and
I sigh to think how easily I could have learned some fact which I should
have been happy to have transmitted with pious care to those who