d at the Picture Presented by a Patriarch--At
Three Score and Ten He Told of an Old Man's Dreams.

THE LAST LEAF.

I saw him once before,
As he passed by the door,
And again
The pavement stones resound,
As he totters o'er the ground
With his cane.

They say that in his prime,
Ere the pruning-knife of Time
Cut him down,
Not a better man was found
By the Crier on his round
Through the town.

But now he walks the streets,
And he looks at all he meets
Sad and wan,
And he shakes his feeble head,
That it seems as if he said,
"They are gone."

The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.

My grandmamma has said--
Poor old lady, she is dead
Long ago--
That he had a Roman nose
And his cheek was like a rose
In the snow;

But now his nose is thin,
And it rests upon his chin
Like a staff,
And a crook is in his back
And a melancholy crack
In his laugh.

I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here;
But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches, and all that,
Are so queer!

And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,
Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling.

AS SEEN AT SEVENTY.

I was a little over twenty years old when I wrote "The Last Leaf." The
world was a garden to me then; it is a churchyard now. And yet those are
not bitter or scalding tears that fall from my eyes upon "mossy marbles."

The young who left my side early in my life's journey are still with me in
the unchanged freshness and beauty of youth. Those who have long kept
company with me live on after their seeming departure, were it only by the
mere force of habit; their images are all around me, as if every surface
had been a sensitive film that photographed them; their voices echo about
me as if they had been recorded on those unforgotten cylinders which bring
back to us the tones and accents that have imprinted them as the extinct
animals left their tracks on the hardened sand.

The melancholy of old age has a divine tenderness in it, which on