et them before, and to whom their antecedents and
peculiarities were matters of old acquaintance, and so unerring is
his judgment of their previous character that when he withholds his
confidence I am apt to withhold mine. It is somewhat remarkable that
while the maturity of his years and the respect due to them is denied by
man, his superiority and venerable age is never questioned by the brute
creation. The dog treats him with a respect and consideration accorded
to none others, and the cat permits a familiarity which I should shudder
to attempt. It may be considered an evidence of some Pantheistic quality
in his previous education, that he seems to recognize a fellowship even
in inarticulate objects; he has been known to verbally address plants,
flowers, and fruit, and to extend his confidence to such inanimate
objects as chairs and tables. There can be little doubt that, in the
remote period of his youth, these objects were endowed with not only
sentient natures, but moral capabilities, and he is still in the habit
of beating them when they collide with him, and of pardoning them with a
kiss.

As he has grown older--rather let me say, as we have approximated to his
years--he has, in spite of the apparent paradox, lost much of his senile
gravity. It must be confessed that some of his actions of late appear to
our imperfect comprehension inconsistent with his extreme age. A habit
of marching up and down with a string tied to a soda-water bottle, a
disposition to ride anything that could by any exercise of the liveliest
fancy be made to assume equine proportions, a propensity to blacken his
venerable white hair with ink and coal dust, and an omnivorous appetite
which did not stop at chalk, clay, or cinders, were peculiarities not
calculated to excite respect. In fact, he would seem to have become
demoralized, and when, after a prolonged absence the other day, he was
finally discovered standing upon the front steps addressing a group of
delighted children out of his limited vocabulary, the circumstance could
only be accounted for as the garrulity of age.

But I lay aside my pen amidst an ominous silence and the disappearance
of the venerable head from my plane of vision. As I step to the other
side of the table, I find that sleep has overtaken him in an overt act
of hoary wickedness. The very pages I have devoted to an exposition
of his deceit he has quietly abstracted, and I find them covered
with cabalistic figures a