ld get an early start. As the centuries filed slowly by Methuselah
got where all he had to do was to shuffle into his loose-fitting
clothes, and rest his gums on the top of a large sleek-headed cane, and
mutter up the chimney, and then groan and extricate himself from his
clothes again and retire. He arose earlier and earlier in the morning,
and muttered more and more about the young folks sleeping away the best
of the day, and said he had no doubt that sleeping and snoring until
breakfast time helped to carry off Lam. But one day old Father Time came
along with a new scythe, and he drew the whetstone across it a few times
and rolled the sleeves of his red flannel undergarment up over his warty
elbows, and Mr. Methuselah passed on to that undiscovered country with a
ripe experience and a long, clean record.

We can almost fancy how the physicians, who had disagreed about his case
all the way through, came and insisted on a post-mortem examination to
prove which was right, and what was really the matter with him. We can
imagine how people went by shaking their heads and regretting that
Methuselah should have tampered with tobacco when he knew it affected
his heart.

But he is gone. He lived to see his own promissory notes rise, flourish,
acquire interest, pine away at last, and finally outlaw. He acquired a
large farm in the very heart of the county-seat, and refused to move or
to plot it and call it Methuselah's addition. He came out in spring
regularly for nine hundred years after he got too old to work out his
poll-tax on the road and put in his time telling the rising generation
how to make a good road. Meantime other old people, who were almost 100
years of age, moved away and went west, where they would attract
attention and command respect. There was actually no pleasure in getting
old around where Methuselah was and being ordered about and scolded and
kept in the background by him.

So when at last he died people sighed and said: "Well, it was better for
him to die before he got childish. It was best that he should die at a
time when he knew it all. We can't help thinking what an acquisition
Methuselah will be on the evergreen shore when he gets there, with all
his ripe experience and habits of early rising."

And the next morning after the funeral Methuselah's family did not get
out of bed till 9 o'clock.

[Illustration]

NOTES ON SOME SPRING STYLES.

THE LADIES FAVORITE BONNET AND HOSIERY--THE SMA