tic. "Meet you at the corner of Tenth and
Chestnut in five minutes."

We tear up the unfinished letter. Bill will never know how much we love
him. Perhaps it is just as well. It is very embarrassing to have your
friends know how you feel about them. When we meet him we will be a
little bit on our guard. It would not be well to be betrayed into any
extravagance of cordiality.

And perhaps a not altogether false little story could be written about a
man who never visited those most dear to him, because it panged him so
to say good-bye when he had to leave.

A LETTER TO FATHER TIME

(NEW YEAR'S EVE)

Dear Father Time--This is your night of triumph, and it seems only fair
to pay you a little tribute. Some people, in a noble mood of bravado,
consider New Year's Eve an occasion of festivity. Long, long in advance
they reserve a table at their favorite cafe; and becomingly habited in
boiled shirts or gowns of the lowest visibility, and well armed with a
commodity which is said to be synonymous with yourself--money--they seek
to outwit you by crowding a month of merriment into half a dozen hours.
Yet their victory is brief and fallacious, for if hours spin too fast by
night they will move grindingly on the axle the next morning. None of us
can beat you in the end. Even the hat-check boy grows old, becomes gray
and dies at last babbling of greenbacks.

To my own taste, old Time, it is more agreeable to make this evening a
season of gruesome brooding. Morosely I survey the faults and follies
of my last year. I am grown too canny to pour the new wine of good
resolution into the old bottles of my imperfect humors. But I get a
certain grim satisfaction in thinking how we all--every human being of
us--share alike in bondage to your oppression. There is the only true
and complete democracy, the only absolute brotherhood of man. The great
ones of the earth--Charley Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, General
Pershing and Miss Amy Lowell--all these are in service to the same
tyranny. Day after day slips or jolts past, joins the Great Majority;
suddenly we wake with a start to find that the best of it is gone by.
Surely it seems but a day ago that Stevenson set out to write a little
book that was to be called "Life at Twenty-five"--before he got it
written he was long past the delectable age--and now we rub our eyes and
see he has been dead longer than the span of life he then so
delightfully contemplated. If there is one medit