a good-conduct prize my father had won at
his preparatory school; a rolled-up sheet of paper, carbonized and dry
and brittle, revealed itself as a piece of specimen writing, stiff with
boyish effort, decorated in ambitious and faltering flourishes and still
betraying the pencil rulings his rubber should have erased. Already your
writing is better than that. And I found a daguerreotype portrait of him
in knickerbockers against a photographer's stile. His face then was not
unlike yours. I stood with that in my hand at the little bureau in his
bedroom, and looked at his dead face.

The flatly painted portrait of his father, my grandfather, hanging
there in the stillness above the coffin, looking out on the world he had
left with steady, humorous blue eyes that followed one about the
room,--that, too, was revivified, touched into reality and participation
by this and that, became a living presence at a conference of lives.
Things of his were there also in that life's accumulation....

There we were, three Strattons together, and down in the dining-room
were steel engravings to take us back two generations further, and we
had all lived full lives, suffered, attempted, signified. I had a
glimpse of the long successions of mankind. What a huge inaccessible
lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how
much we are, how little we transmit. Each one of us was but a variation,
an experiment upon the Stratton theme. All that I had now under my hands
was but the merest hints and vestiges, moving and surprising indeed, but
casual and fragmentary, of those obliterated repetitions. Man is a
creature becoming articulate, and why should those men have left so much
of the tale untold--to be lost and forgotten? Why must we all repeat
things done, and come again very bitterly to wisdom our fathers have
achieved before us? My grandfather there should have left me something
better than the still enigma of his watching face. All my life so far
has gone in learning very painfully what many men have learnt before me;
I have spent the greater part of forty years in finding a sort of
purpose for the uncertain and declining decades that remain. Is it not
time the generations drew together and helped one another? Cannot we
begin now to make a better use of the experiences of life so that our
sons may not waste themselves so much, cannot we gather into books that
men may read in an hour or so the gist of these confused and
mul