er. They dog my
footsteps; they silently pass judgment upon me, and I shall never be
able to shake them off until I am dead. Why did they come to worry us?
We were so happy before we knew of their existence. Out upon them both!

Alas, poor philosopher! Shall I begrudge to my darlings the happiness
that I have known in the too swiftly fleeting years of our married
life? Love has come to claim my flesh and blood even as it claimed me
and Josephine a quarter of a century ago never to loose us from his
silken chains. Love the immortal, the transfigurer of souls, the
unsealer of eyes which in vain have sought the light which streams from
eternity, thou hast come to work anew the old, old story, even though
thy coming rends my heart-strings. Down, selfish, stubborn fumes of
senile cynicism! I bow to the law of life. Come to my embrace, O
sons-in-law; I love you, I bid you welcome to my hearth, even though
you regard me as one for whom the grave is yawning! Listen how bravely
I call Jim--Jim--Jim, a thousand times Jim. And you, the other one,
whose name I do not know, but whose fell purpose I have detected, when
your name is divulged to me I will call that too.

X

Said Josephine to me some three months ago: "Fred, we shall have been
married twenty-five years on the twenty-first of next November. We
ought to celebrate it in some way."

"How better than by having a silver wedding?"

"Because so many people would feel obliged to give us silver," she
replied. "I am perfectly willing, Fred, that people, should send me
flowers when I'm dead, but I will not have them send silver to my
silver wedding."

"The simplest way then would be to tell them not to. Put in the corner
of the invitation the letters A. S. W. B. S. B. 'All silver will be
sent back.'"

"This is a serious subject, Fred. I should like very much to have our
best friends with us on the anniversary, if I could feel sure that they
wouldn't regard it as a tax. We all give willingly when people are
married, but it does seem rather a grind, as the children used to say,
to have to go out and buy something else a quarter of a century later,
when you know that the senile old couple will be able to use whatever
you get only a few years at the farthest, and that then it will be
snapped up or melted up by their children or grandchildren. Mind you,
dear, I should often be glad to give silver myself, if I could afford
it; but I am looking at the matt