ing rookery home.

Tennyson has done his best in showing us venerable in his picture of

'the Ionian father of the rest:
A million wrinkles carved his silver skin,
A hundred winters snowed upon his breast.'

But who would not rather be Helen than Homer, her face launching a
thousand ships and burning the topless tower of Ilion--fairer than the
evening air and simply but effectively attired in the beauty of a
thousand stars? What poet has ever said things like that of an old man,
even of Methuselah?"

"Yes," the poet sighed. "I suppose you are partly right. Meteorology
certainly has the advantage of humanity in some things. We cannot make
much of age here, and hereafter we can only conceive of its being turned
into youth. Fancy an eternity of sensibility!"

"No, I would rather not!" he of the Easy Chair returned, sharply.
"Besides, it is you who are trying to make age out a tolerable, even a
desirable thing."

"But I have given it up," the poet meekly replied. "The great thing
would be some rearrangement of our mortal conditions so that once a year
we could wake from our dream of winter and find ourselves young. Not
merely younger, but _young_--the genuine article. A tree can do that,
and does it every year, until after a hundred years, or three hundred,
or a thousand, it dies. Why should not a man, or, much more importantly,
a woman, do it? I think we are very much scanted in that respect."

"My dear fellow, if you begin fault-finding with creation, there will be
no end to it. It might be answered that, in this case, you can walk
about and a tree cannot; you can call upon me and a tree cannot. And
other things. Come! the trees have not got it all their own way.
Besides, imagine the discomforts of a human springtime, blowing hot and
blowing cold, freezing, thawing, raining, and drouthing, and never
being sure whether we are young or old, May or December. We should be
such nuisances to one another that we should ask the gods to take back
their gift, and you know very well they cannot."

"Our rejuvenescence would be a matter of temperament, not temperature,"
the poet said, searching the air hopefully for an idea. "I have noticed
this spring that the isothermal line is as crooked as a railroad on the
map of a rival. I have been down in New Hampshire since I saw you, and I
found the spring temperamentally as far advanced there as here in New
York. Of course not as far advanced as in Union Square, but