ce he antedated all the others by at
least three centuries. The historians and the antiquarians of the time
found him of much assistance to them in their labors, since he was
always ready to provide them with dates touching incidents of the
remote period from which he had come down unscathed. He remembered
vividly how, when he was 186 years of age, the Euphrates had frozen
over to a depth of seven feet; the 209th winter of his existence he
referred to as "the winter of the deep snow;" he remembered that
when he was a boy the women had more character than the women
of these later years; he had a vivid recollection of the great
plague that prevailed in the city of Enoch during his fourth
century; he could repeat, word for word, the address of welcome
his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Adam delivered to an
excursion party that came over from the land of Nod one time when
Methuselah was a mere child of eighty-seven,--oh, yes, poor old
Methuselah was full of reminiscence, and having crowded an active
career into the brief period of 969 years, it can be imagined that
ponderous tomes would not hold the tales he told whenever he was
encouraged.

One day, however, Methuselah's grandson Noah took the old gentleman
aside and confided into his ear-trumpet a very solemn secret which must
have grieved the old gentleman immensely, for he gnashed his gums and
wrung his thin, bony hands and groaned dolorously.

"The end of all flesh is at hand," said Noah. "The earth is filled
with violence through them, and God will destroy them with the earth.
I will make an ark of gopher-wood, the length thereof 300 cubits, the
breadth of it 50 cubits, and the height of it 30 cubits, and I will
pitch it within and without with pitch. Into the ark will I come, and
my sons and my wife, and my sons' wives, and certain living beasts
shall come, and birds of the air, and we and they shall be saved. Come
thou also, for thou art an austere man and a just."

But as Methuselah sate alone upon his couch that night he thought of
his life: how sweet it had been,--how that, despite the evil now and
then, there had been more of happiness than of sorrow in it. He even
forgot the wickedness of the world and remembered only its good and its
sunshine, its kindness and its love. He blessed God for it all, and he
prayed for the death-angel to come to him ere he beheld the destruction
of all he so much loved.

Then the angel came and spread his sha