e's chamber, her feeble gaze was
lifted to the ceiling. At the sound of his footsteps she let it fall
dimly upon his face. He was thankful that, in that last moment of
doubtful quickening, she could not read his eyes; and she passed away,
smiling sweetly, one of her white old hands in his, and one in her
child's.

* * * * *

Age takes small account of the immediate flight of time. To the young, a
year is a mighty span. Be it a happy or an unhappy year that youth
looks forward to, it is a vista that stretches far into the future. And
when it is done, this interminable year, and youth, just twelve months
older, looks back to the first of it, what a long way off it is! What
tremendous progress we have made! How much more we know! How
insufficient are the standards by which we measured the world a poor
three hundred and sixty-five days back!

But age has grown habituated to the flight of time. Years? we have seen
so many of them that they make no great impression upon us. What! is it
ten years since young Midas first came to the counting-room, asking
humbly for an entry-clerk's place--he who is now the head of the firm?
Bless us! it seems like yesterday. Is it ten years since we first put on
that coat? Why, it must be clean out of the fashion by this time.

But age does not carry out the thought, and ask if itself be out of the
fashion. Age knows better. A few wrinkles, a stoop in the back, a
certain slowness of pace, do not make a man old at sixty--nor at
seventy, neither; for now you come to think of it, the ten years we were
speaking of is gone, and it is seventy now, and not sixty. Seventy! Why,
'tis not to be thought of as old age--save when it may be necessary to
rebuke the easy arrogance of youth.

The time had come to Jacob Dolph when he could not feel that he was
growing old. He was old, of course, in one sense. He was sixty-one when
the war broke out; and they had not allowed him to form a regiment and
go to the front at its head. But what was old for a soldier in active
service was not old for a well-preserved civilian. True, he could never
be the same man again, now that poor Aline was gone. True, he was
growing more and more disinclined for active exercise, and he regretted
he had led so sedentary a life. But though '64 piled itself up on '63,
and '65 on top of that, these arbitrary divisions of time seemed to him
but trivial.

Edith was growing old, perhaps; getting to be