re of living
a month. Happy people! thought I; you are certainly under a wise,
just, and mild government, since you have no public grievances to
complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections and
imperfections of foreign music. I turned my head from them to an old
gray-headed one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to
himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I put it down in writing, in
hopes it will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much indebted for the
most pleasing of all amusements, her delicious company and heavenly
harmony.

"It was," said he, "the opinion of learned philosophers of our race
who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world,
the Moulin Joly, could not itself subsist more than eighteen hours;
and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since by the
apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature,
and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the
ocean at the end of our earth, it must then finish its course, be
extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in
cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and
destruction. I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no
less than four hundred and twenty minutes of time. How very few of us
continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire.
My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends
of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them;
for by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect
to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my
toil and labor in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot
live to enjoy? What the political struggles I have been engaged in for
the good of my compatriot inhabitants of this bush, or my
philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general? for in
politics, what can laws do without morals? Our present race of
ephemerae will in a course of minutes become corrupt, like those of
other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in
philosophy how small our progress! Alas! art is long and life is
short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I
shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to
nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no
longer exists? and what will become of all history in the eighteenth
hour, when