, but I have viewed with such increasing alarm
the growth of sensationalism in the literary output of my age that I
have felt that I owed it to my posterity, which is rapidly growing in
numbers--I believe that the latest annual report of the Society of the
Sons and Daughters of Methuselah shows a membership of six hundred and
thirty-eight thousand, without counting the new arrivals since the end
of the last fiscal year, which, at a rough guess, I should place at
thirty-six thousand--I have felt, I say, that I owe it to that
posterity to set it the example of not reading, as my most effective
protest against those pernicious influences which have made the modern
literary school a menace to civilization. Surely if Noah's children
for instance, Shem, Ham and Japhet, whom I have already had occasion
to mention, were to surprise me, their venerable, and I hope venerated
ancestor, reading such stories as are now put forth by our most
successful quarrymen--stories like that unspeakable novel "Three
Decades," of which I am credibly informed eight million tons have
already been sold; and which, let me say, when I had read only seven
slabs of it I had carted away and dumped into the Red Sea; or the
innocuous but highly frivolous tales of Miss Laura Jean
Diplodocus--they would hardly accept from me as worthy of serious
attention such admonitions as I am constantly giving them on the
subject of the decadence of literature when I find them poring over
the novels of the day. Consequently even this usual solace of old age
is denied to me, and writing becomes my refuge.

I bespeak the reader's indulgence if he or she find in the ensuing
pages any serious lapses from true literary style. I write merely as I
feel, and do not pretend to be either an expert hieroglyphist or a
rhetorician of commanding quality. Perhaps I should do more wisely if
I were to accept the advice of my great-grandson Ham, who, overhearing
my remark to a caller last Sunday evening that the work I have
undertaken is one of considerable difficulty, climbed up into my lap
and in his childish way asked me why I did not hire a boswell to do it
for me. I had to tell the child that I did not know what a boswell
was, and when I questioned him on the subject more closely, I found
that it was only one of his childish fancies. If there were such a
thing as that rather euphoniously named invention of Ham's who could
relieve me of the drudgery of writing my own life, and who wo