or two of us at
most will be alive fifty years hence."

"Let's draw lots for the two victims, and the rest of us will appear as
ghosts," suggested Frank grimly.

"Poor two," sighed Nellie. "I 'm sorry for them. How lonely they will
be. I'm glad I have n't got a very good constitution."

But Henry remarked that Jessie might have gone further and said just as
truly that none of them would survive fifty years, or even ten.

"We may, some of us, escape the pang of dying as long as that," said he,
"but that is but a trifle, and not a necessary incident of death. The
essence of mortality is change, and we shall be changed. Ten years will
see us very different persons. What though an old dotard calling himself
Henry Long is stumping around fifty years hence, what is that to me? I
shall have been dead a half century by that time."

"The old gentleman you speak so lightly of will probably think more
tenderly of you than you do of him," said Jessie.

"I don't believe it," answered Henry. "In fact, if we were entirely true
to nature next Wednesday, it would spoil the fun, for we probably should
not, if actually of the age we pretend, think of our youth once a year,
much less meet to talk it over."

"Oh, I don't think so," protested Nellie. "I 'm sure all the story-books
and poetry say that old folks are much given to reviewing their youth in
a pensive, regretful sort of way."

"That's all very pretty, but it 's all gammon in my opinion," responded
Henry. "The poets are young people who know nothing of how old folks
feel, and argue only from their theory of the romantic fitness of
things. I believe that reminiscence takes up a very small part of old
persons' time. It would furnish them little excitement, for they have
lost the feelings by which their memories would have to be interpreted
to become vivid. Remembering is dull business at best. I notice that
most persons, even of eventful lives, prefer a good novel to the
pleasures of recollection. It is really easier to sympathize with the
people in a novel or drama than with our past selves. We lose a
great source of recreation just because we can't recall the past more
vividly."

"How shockingly Henry contradicts to-night," was the only reply Nellie
deigned to this long speech.

"What shall we call each other next Wednesday?" asked Mary. "By our
first names, as now?"

"Not if we are going to be prophetically accurate," said Henry. "Fifty
years hence, in all probabili