riend the Poet, is unavoidably absent on this interesting
occasion) has given me reason to suppose that he would occupy my
empty chair about the first of January next. If he comes among
you, be kind to him, as you have been to me. May the Lord bless
you all!--And we shook hands all round the table.

Half an hour afterwards the breakfast things and the cloth were
gone. I looked up and down the length of the bare boards over
which I had so often uttered my sentiments and experiences--and
--Yes, I am a man, like another.

All sadness vanished, as, in the midst of these old friends of
mine, whom you know, and others a little more up in the world,
perhaps, to whom I have not introduced you, I took the
schoolmistress before the altar from the hands of the old gentleman
who used to sit opposite, and who would insist on giving her away.

And now we two are walking the long path in peace together. The
"schoolmistress" finds her skill in teaching called for again,
without going abroad to seek little scholars. Those visions of
mine have all come true.

I hope you all love me none the less for anything I have told you.
Farewell!

THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.

The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a
quarter of a century since these papers were written. Statements which
were true then are not necessarily true now. Thus, the speed of the
trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of the year
when the fastest time to that date was given must be very considerably
altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page 49 of the
"Autocrat." No doubt many other statements and opinions might be more or
less modified if I were writing today instead of having written before
the war, when the world and I were both more than a score of years
younger.

These papers followed close upon the track of the "Autocrat." They had
to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected, which is a
formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest. Paradise
Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are enough to
warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his arrow of the
danger of missing when he looses "his fellow of the selfsame flight."

There is good reason why it should be so. The first juice that runs of
itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and tastes o