n taken from
me.

CHAPTER XX.

CONCLUSION.

Assuredly it seemed to me that all was over; and the future a dead
blank. And for a time I was as a man stunned.

But in truth it was very far otherwise! I was fifty-five; but I was in
good health, young for my years, strong and vigorous in constitution,
and before a year had passed it began to seem to me that a future,
and life and its prospects, might open to me afresh; that the curtain
might be dropped on the drama that was passed, and a new phase of life
begun.

I had had, and vividly enjoyed an entire life, according to the
measure that is meted out to many, perhaps I may say to most men.
But I felt myself ready for another! And--thanks this time also to
a woman--I have _had_ another, _in no wise_ less happy, in some
respects, as less chequered by sorrows--more happy than the first! I
am in better health too, having outgrown apparently several of the
maladies which young people are subject to!

Of this second life I am not now going to tell my readers anything.
"What I remember" of my first life may be, and I hope has been, told
frankly without giving offence or annoyance to any human being. I
don't know that the telling of the story of my second life would
necessarily lead me to say anything which could hurt anybody. But
mixed up as its incidents and interests and associations have been
with a great multitude of men and women still living and moving and
talking and writing round about me, I should not feel myself so
comfortably at liberty to write whatever offered itself to my memory.

Ten years hence, perhaps ("Please God, the public lives!" as a
speculative showman said), I may tell the reader, if he cares to hear
it, the story of my second life. For the present we will break off
here.

But not without some words of parting kindness--and shall we say,
wisdom!--from an old man to readers, most of whom probably might be
his sons, and many doubtless his grandsons.

Especially, my young friends, don't pay overmuch attention to what the
Psalmist says about "the years of man." I knew _dans le temps_ a fine
old octo-and-nearly-nonogenarian, one Graberg de Hemsoe, a Swede (a man
with a singular history, who passed ten years of his early life in the
British navy, and was, when I knew him, librarian at the Pitti Palace
in Florence), who used to complain of the Florentine doctors that "Dey
doosen't know what de nordern constitooshions is!" and I take it the