I am really dawnced out"

HARPER'S

VOL. CXXXVI.

MAGAZINE

No. DCCCXII

20 we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting, our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over us?-the one advantage of time!

After all, it is not disputable that we have lived longer than they. When they talk of past poets, or politicians, or novelists, whom the young still deign to remember, of whom for once their estimate agrees with ours, we can sometimes put in a quiet-"I saw him" or "I talked with him"-which for the moment wins the conversational race. And as we elders fall back before the brilliance and glitter of the New Age, advancing "like an army with banners," this mere prerogative of years becomes in itself a precious possession. After all, we cannot divest ourselves of it, if we would. It is better to make friends with it-to turn it into a kind of panache -to wear it with an air, since wear it we

For me, the first point that stands out in the landscape of the past is the arrival of a little girl of five, in the year 1856, at a gray stone house in a Westmorland valley, where fourteen years earlier, the children of Arnold of Rugby, the "Doctor" of Tom Brown's Schooldays, had waited on an afternoon in June Copyright, 1917, by Harper &

to greet their father expected from the South, only to hear, as the summer day died away, that two hours' sharp illness, that very morning, had taken him from them. Of what preceded my arrival as a black-haired, dark-eyed child, with my father, mother, and two brothers, at Fox How, the holiday house among the mountains which the famous headmaster had built for himself in 1833, I have but little recollection. I see dimly another house in wide fields, where dwarf lilies grew, and I know that it was a house in Tasmania, where at the time of my birth my father, Thomas Arnold, the Doctor's second son, was organizing education in the young colony. I can just recall too, the deck of a ship which to my childish feet seemed vast-but the William Brown was a sailing ship of only 400 tons!-in which we made the voyage home in 1856. Three months and a half we took about it, going round the Horn in bitter weather, much run over by rats at night, and expected to take our baths by day in two huge barrels full of sea water on the deck, into which we children were plunged shivering by our nurse, two or three times a week. My father and mother, their three children, and some small cousins, who were going to England under my mother's care, were the only