ollege after the death of
his father. Be that as it may, the noxious weed certainly hastened his
death, for 600 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
grand-children 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 fence 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 centuries, while Methuselah continued to stand out amid the
general wreck of men and nations.

Even as the young, strong mower going forth with his mower to mow
spareth the tall and dignified drab hornet's nests and passeth by on the
other side, so time, with his Waterbury hour-glass and his overworked
hay-knife over his shoulder, and his long Mormon whiskers and his high,
sleek dome of thought, with its gray lambrequin of hair around the base
of it, mowed all around Methuselah and then passed on.

Methuselah decorated the graves of those who perished in a dozen
different wars. He did not enlist himself, for over nine hundred years
of his life he was exempt. He would go to the enlisting place and offer
his services, and the officer would tell him to go home and encourage
his grand-children to go. Then Methuselah would sit around Noah's steps,
and smoke and criticise the conduct of the war, also the conduct of the
enemy.

It is said of Methuselah that he never was the same man after his son
Lamech died. He was greatly attached to Lamech, and when he woke up one
night to find his son purple in the face with membraneous croup he could
hardly realize that he might lose him. The idea of losing a boy who had
just rounded the glorious morn of his 777th year had never occurred to
him. But death loves a shining mark, and he garnered little Lammie and
left Methuselah to moan and mourn on for a couple more centuries without
him.

Methuselah finally got so that he couldn't sleep after 4 o'clock in the
morning, and he didn't see how anyone else could. The older he got and
the less valuable his time became the earlier he would rise, so that he
cou