brush, nor gray-clad
winter. Nor did I care how the wind blew the swift seasons across the
earth. Let Time's horses gallop, I cried. Speed! The bewildering peaks
of youth are forward. The inn for the night lies far across the
mountains.

But the seconds were entered on the ledger. At last the gray penman
has made his footing. The great page turns. I have passed out of the
thirties.

I am not given to brooding on my age. It is only by checking the years
on my fingers that I am able to reckon the time of my birth. In the
election booth, under a hard eye, I fumble the years and invite
suspicion. Eighteen hundred and seventy-eight, I think it was. But
even this salient fact--this milepost on my eternity--I remember most
quickly by the recollection of a jack-knife acquired on my tenth
birthday. By way of celebration on that day, having selected the
longest blade, I cut the date--1888--in the kitchen woodwork with
rather a pretty flourish when the cook was out. The swift events that
followed the discovery--the dear woman paddled me with a great spoon
through the door--fastened the occurrence in my memory.

It was about the year of the jack-knife that there lived in our
neighborhood a bad boy whose name was Elmer. I would have quite
forgotten him except that I met him on the pavement a few weeks ago.
He was the bully of our street--a towering rogue with red hair and one
suspender. I remember a chrome bandage which he shifted from toe to
toe. This lad was of larger speech than the rest of us and he could
spit between his teeth. He used to snatch the caps of the younger boys
and went off with our baseball across the fences. He was wrapped, too,
in mystery, and it was rumored--softly from ear to ear--that once he
had been arrested and taken to the station-house.

And yet here he was, after all these years, not a bearded brigand with
a knife sticking from his boot, but a mild undersized man, hat in
hand, smiling at me with pleasant cordiality. His red hair had faded
to a harmless carrot. From an overtopping rascal he had dwindled to my
shoulder. It was as strange and incomprehensible as if the broken
middle-aged gentleman, my familiar neighbor across the street who nods
all day upon his step, were pointed out to me as Captain Kidd retired.
Can it be that all villains come at last to a slippered state? Does
Dick Turpin of the King's highway now falter with crutch along a
garden path? And Captain Singleton, now that his last vi