ion.

It made me perhaps unreasonably sad. I know that population must
increase, and that people had better live in convenient houses near
their work. The town is prosperous enough; there is work in plenty and
good wages. There is nothing over which a philanthropist and a social
reformer ought not to rejoice. But I cannot help feeling the loss of a
simple and beautiful thing, though I know it appealed to few people,
and though the house was held to be inconvenient and out of date. I
feel as if the old place must have acquired some sort of personality,
and must be suffering the innocent pangs of disembodiment. I know that
there is abundance of the same kind of simple beauty everywhere; and
yet I feel that a thing which has taken so long to mature, and which
has drunk in and appropriated so much sweetness from the gentle hands
of nature, ought not so ruthlessly and yet so inevitably to suffer
destruction.

But it brought home to me a deeper and a darker thing still--the sad
change and vicissitude of things, the absence of any permanence in this
life of ours. We enter it so gaily, and, as a child, one feels that it
is eternal. That is in itself so strange--that the child himself, who
is so late an inmate of the family home, so new a care to his parents,
should feel that his place in the world is so unquestioned, and that
the people and things that surround him are all part of the settled
order of life. It was, indeed, to me as a child a strange shock to
discover, as I did from old schoolroom books, that my mother herself
had been a child so short a time before my own birth.

Then life begins to move on, and we become gradually, very gradually,
conscious of the swift rush of things. People round us begin to die,
and drop out of their places. We leave old homes that we have loved. We
hurry on ourselves from school to college; we enter the world. Then, in
such a life as my own has been, the lesson comes insistently near. Boys
come under our care, little tender creatures; a few days seem to pass
and they are young and dignified men; a few years later they return as
parents, to see about placing boys of their own; and one can hardly
trace the boyish lineaments in the firm-set, bearded faces of manhood.

Then our own friends begin to be called away; faster and faster runs
the stream; anniversaries return with horrible celerity; and soon we
know that we must die.

What is one to hold on to in such a swift flux of things? The