ty-five Enoch arose one night and telephoned his family physician to
come over and assist him in meeting Methuselah.

Day at last dawned on Enoch's happy home, and its first red rays lit up
the still redder surface of the little stranger. For three hundred years
Enoch and Methuselah jogged along together in the capacity of father and
son. Then Enoch was suddenly cut down. It was at this time that little
Methuselah first realized what it was to be an orphan. He could not at
first realize that his father was dead. He could not understand why
Enoch, with no inherited disease, should be shuffled off at the age of
three hundred and sixty-five years. But the doctor said to Methuselah:
"My son, you are indeed fatherless. I have done all I could, but it is
useless. I have told Enoch many a time that if he went in swimming
before the ice went out of the creek it would finally down him, but he
thought he knew better than I did. He was a headstrong man, Enoch was.
He sneered at me and alluded to me as a fresh young gosling, because he
was three hundred years older than I was. He has received the reward of
the willful, and verily the doom of the smart Aleck is his."

Methuselah now cast about him for some occupation which would take up
his attention and assuage his wild, passionate grief over the loss of
his father. He entered into the walks of men and learned their ways. It
was at this time that he learned the pernicious habit of using tobacco.
We cannot wonder at it when we remember that he was now fatherless. He
was at the mercy of the coarse, rough world. Possibly he learned the use
of tobacco when he went away to attend business college after the death
of his father. Be that as it may, the noxious weed certainly hastened
his death, for six hundred years after this we find him a corpse!

Death is ever a surprise, even at the end of a long illness and after a
ripe old age. To those who are near it seems abrupt; so to his
grandchildren, some of whom survived him, his children having died of
old age, the death of Methuselah came like a thunderbolt from a clear
sky.

Methuselah succeeded in cording up more of a record, such as it was,
than any other man of whom history informs us. Time, the tomb-builder
and amateur mower, came and leaned over the front yard and looked at
Methuselah, and ran his thumb over the jagged edge of his scythe, and
went away whistling a low refrain. He kept up this refrain business for
nearly ten centuri