e you with
further details. Sufficient has been said to enable you to understand
how affecting it was to meet this old man in the red and yellow woods,
at the end of a breathless autumn day, trying to fell a young larch. He
talked so rapidly, and one story flowed so easily into another, that it
was a long time before I could get in a word. At last I was able to get
out of him that the Colonel had given him leave to build a house on the
shore, where he would be out of everybody's way. "All my old friends are
gone, the Colonel's father and his mother. God be merciful to her! she
was a good woman, the very best. And all I want now is time to think of
them that's gone.... Didn't I know the Colonel's grandfather and his
grandmother? They're all buried in the cemetery yonder in Kiltoon, and
on a fine evenin' I do like to be sittin' on a stone by the lake,
thinking of them all."

'It was at once touching and impressive to see this old man, weak as a
child, the only trembling thing in a moveless day, telling these
wanderings of an almost insane brain. You will say, "But what matter?
They may not be true in fact, but they are his truth, they are himself,
they are his age." His ninety-five years are represented in his confused
talk, half recollection, half complaints about the present. He knew my
father and mother, too, and, peering into my face, he caught sight of a
gray hair, and I heard him mutter:

'"Ah! they grow gray quicker now than they used to."

'As I walked home in the darkening light, I bethought myself of the few
years left to me to live, though I am still a young man, that in a few
years, which would pass like a dream, I should be as frail as Patsy
Murphy, who is ninety-five. "Why should I not live as long?" I asked
myself, losing my teeth one by one and my wits.'

'_September_.

'I was interrupted in my description of the melancholy season, and I
don't know how I should have finished that letter if I had not been
interrupted. The truth is that the season was but a pretext. I did not
dare to write asking you to forgive me for having returned your letter.
I do not do so now. I will merely say that I returned the letter because
it annoyed me, and, shameful as the admission may be, I admit that I
returned it because I wished to annoy you. I said to myself, "If this be
so--if, in return for kind thought--Why shouldn't she suffer? I
suffer." One isn't--one cannot be--held responsible for every base
thought that ent