ed the
surveying chains over the land in dispute, and who were now aged
respectively one hundred and four years and one hundred and six
years. Hamilton gently attempted to undervalue their testimony, but
he was instantly put down by the Dutch justice, who suggested that
Mr. Hamilton could not be aware of the age of the witnesses.

My old man (the expression seems familiar and inelegant) had indeed
an exaggerated idea of his own age, and sometimes said that he
supposed he was going on four hundred, which was true enough, in
fact; but for the exact date, he referred to his youngest son,--a
frisky and humorsome lad of eighty years, who had received us at the
gate, and whom we had at first mistaken for the veteran, his father.
But when we beheld the old man, we saw the difference between age and
age. The latter had settled into a grizzliness and grimness which
belong to a very aged and stunted but sturdy oak-tree, upon the bark
of which the gray moss is thick and heavy. The old man appeared hale
enough, he could walk about, his sight and hearing were not seriously
impaired, he ate with relish, and his teeth were so sound that he
would not need a dentist for at least another century; but the moss
was growing on him. His boy of eighty seemed a green sapling beside
him.

He remembered absolutely nothing that had taken place within thirty
years, but otherwise his mind was perhaps as good as it ever was, for
he must always have been an ignoramus, and would never know anything
if he lived to be as old as he said he was going on to be. Why he
was interested in the rebellion of 1745 I could not discover, for he
of course did not go over to Scotland to carry a pike in it, and he
only remembered to have heard it talked about as a great event in the
Irish market-town near which he lived, and to which he had ridden
when a boy. And he knew much more about the horse that drew him, and
the cart in which he rode, than he did about the rebellion of the
Pretender.

I hope I do not appear to speak harshly of this amiable old man, and
if he is still living I wish him well, although his example was bad
in some respects. He had used tobacco for nearly a century, and the
habit has very likely been the death of him. If so, it is to be
regretted. For it would have been interesting to watch the process
of his gradual disintegration and return to the ground: the loss of
sense after sense, as decaying limbs fall from the oak; the failure
of discr