of all in
the writing of this Autobiography if for no worthier object than to
provide occupation for my leisure hours which, in these patriarchal
days to which I have attained, sometimes hang heavy on my hands. I
know not why it should so transpire, but it is the fact that since I
passed my nine hundred and fiftieth birthday I have had little liking
for the pleasures which modern society most affects. To be sure, old
and feeble as I am, and despite the uncertain quality of my knees, I
still enjoy the excitement of the Virginia Reel, and can still hold my
own with men several centuries younger than myself in the clog, but I
leave such diversions as bridge, draw-poker and pinochle to more
frivolous minds--though I will say that when my great-grandchildren,
Shem, Ham and Japhet, the sons of my grandson Noah, come to my house
on the few holidays, their somewhat over-sober parent allows them from
their labors in the ship-yard, I take great delight in sitting upon
the ground with them and renewing my acquaintance with those games of
my youth, marbles, and mumbledy-peg, the which I learned from my
great-uncle-seven-times-removed, Cain, in the days when with my
grandfather, Jared, I used to go to see our first ancestor, Adam, at
the old farm just outside of Edensburg where, with his beautiful wife
Eve, that Grand Old Man was living in honored retirement.

Nor have I in these days, as I used to have, any especial taste for
the joys of the chase. There was a time when my slungshot was
unerring, and I could bring down a Dodo, or snipe my Harpy on the wing
with as much ease as my wife can hit our barn-door with a rolling-pin
at six feet, and for three hundred and thirty years I never let escape
me any opportunity for tracking the Dinosaur, the Pterodactyl, or that
fierce and sanguinary creature the Osteostogothemy to his lair and
there fighting him unto the death during the open season for wild game
of that particular sort. I well remember how, in my boyhood days, to
be precise, shortly after my two hundred and twenty-second birthday, I
went with my great-grandfather, Mehalaleel, over into the woods back
of Little Ararat after a great horned Ornythyrhyncus and--but that is
another story. Suffice it to say that I have at last reached a period
in my life where I am content to leave the pleasures of Nimrod to my
more nimble neighbors, and that now no winged thing, save an
occasional mosquito, or locust, need fear my approach, and that