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Title: The Last Leaf
Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America
and Europe

Author: James Kendall Hosmer

Release Date: May 25, 2004 [EBook #12429]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Last Leaf

Observations, during Seventy-five Years,
of Men and Events in America and Europe

By
James Kendall Hosmer, LL.D.

Member of the Minnesota Historical Society, Corresponding Member
of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Colonial Society of
Massachusetts

Author of "A Short History of German Literature," "The Story of the
Jews," the Lives of Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Sir Henry Vane,
etc.

1912

FOREWORD

Standing on the threshold of my eightieth year, stumbling badly,
moreover, through the mutiny, well justified, of a pair of worn-out
eyes, I, a veteran maker of books, must look forward to the closing of
an over-long series.

I retain in my memory certain films, which record impressions of long
ago. Can I not possibly develop and present these film records for a
moving picture of the men and events of an eventful period?

We old story-tellers do our talking under a heavy handicap. Homer,
long ago, found us garrulous, and compared us to cicadas chirping
unprofitably in the city-gate. In the modern time, too, Dr. Holmes,
ensconced in smug youth, could "sit and grin" at one of our kind as he

"Totters o'er the ground
With his cane."

He thought

"His breeches and all that
Were so queer."

The "all that" is significant. To the callow young doctor, men of our
kind were throughout queered, and so, too, think the spruce and jaunty
company who are shouldering us so fast out of the front place. In
their thought we are more than depositors of last leaves, in fact we
are last leaves ourselves, capable in the green possibly of a pleasant
murmur, but in the dry with no voice but a rattle prophetic of winter.
I hope Dr. Holmes lived to repent his grin.