nry, leaning back in his chair, with his hands
clasped behind his head, and his long legs crossed before him. "Let us
dress up to resemble what we expect to look like fifty years hence, and
study up our demeanor to correspond with what we expect to be and feel
like at that time, and just call on Mary next Wednesday evening to talk
over old times, and recall what we can, if anything, of our vanished
youth, and the days when we belonged to the social club at C------."

The others seemed rather puzzled in spite of the explanation. Jessie sat
looking at Henry in a brown study as she traced out his meaning.

"You mean a sort of ghost party," said she finally; "ghosts of the
future, instead of ghosts of the past."

"That's it exactly," answered he. "Ghosts of the future are the only
sort worth heeding. Apparitions of things past are a very unpractical
sort of demonology, in my opinion, compared with apparitions of things
to come."

"How in the world did such an odd idea come into your head?" asked
pretty Nellie Tyrrell, whose dancing black eyes were the most piquant
of interrogation points, with which it was so delightful to be punctured
that people were generally slow to gratify her curiosity.

"I was beginning a journal this afternoon," said Henry, "and the idea of
Henry Long, aetat. seventy, looking over the leaves, and wondering about
the youth who wrote them so long ago, came up to my mind."

Henry's suggestion had set them all thinking, and the vein was so
unfamiliar that they did not at once find much to say.

"I should think," finally remarked George, "that such an old folks'
party would afford a chance for some pretty careful study, and some
rather good acting."

"Fifty years will make us all not far from seventy. What shall we look
like then, I wonder?" musingly asked Mary Fellows.

She was the demurest, dreamiest of the three girls; the most of a woman,
and the least of a talker. She had that poise and repose of manner which
are necessary to make silence in company graceful.

"We may be sure of one thing, anyhow, and that is, that we shall not
look and feel at all as we do now," said Frank. "I suppose," he added,
"if, by a gift of second sight, we could see tonight, as in a glass,
what we shall be at seventy, we should entirely fail to recognize
ourselves, and should fall to disputing which was which."

"Yes, and we shall doubtless have changed as much in disposition as in
appearance," added Henry. "Now