, and the dynasty will be deposed.

As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things
and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much
they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone
twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of
his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we had
recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden
candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber. So it was the other day after my
reminiscences of the old gambrel-roofed house and its visitors. They
found an echo in the recollections of one of the brightest and liveliest
of my suburban friends, whose memory is exact about everything except her
own age, which, there can be no doubt, she makes out a score or two of
years more than it really is. Still she was old enough to touch some
lights--and a shadow or two--into the portraits I had drawn, which made
me wish that she and not I had been the artist who sketched the pictures.
Among the lesser regrets that mingle with graver sorrows for the friends
of an earlier generation we have lost, are our omissions to ask them so
many questions they could have answered easily enough, and would have
been pleased to be asked. There! I say to myself sometimes, in an
absent mood, I must ask her about that. But she of whom I am now
thinking has long been beyond the reach of any earthly questioning, and I
sigh to think how easily I could have learned some fact which I should
have been happy to have transmitted with pious care to those who are to
come after me. How many times I have heard her quote the line about
blessings brightening as they take their flight, and how true it proves
in many little ways that one never thinks of until it is too late.

The Register of Deeds is not himself advanced in years. But he borrows
an air of antiquity from the ancient records which are stored in his
sepulchral archives. I love to go to his ossuary of dead transactions,
as I would visit the catacombs of Rome or Paris. It is like wandering up
the Nile to stray among the shelves of his monumental folios. Here
stands a series of volumes, extending over a considerable number of
years, all of which volumes are in his handwriting. But as you go
backward there is a break, and you come upon the writing of another
person, who was getting old apparently, for it is beginning to be a
little shaky, and then you know