e lesson that verse,--you know,--that if all these things
should be written, even the world itself could not contain the books
that should be written; and there Uncle Capen stopped me, and said he,
'I suppose that means the world as known to the ancients?'"

Holt put on his hat, and with a smile turned and went on his way toward
the parsonage; but he remembered that he had promised to call at what
the local paper termed "the late residence of the deceased," where, on
the one hundredth birthday of the centenarian, according to the poet's
corner,--

"Friends, neighbors, and visitors he did receive
From early in the morning till dewy eve."

So he turned his steps in that direction. He opened the clicking latch
of the gate and rattled the knocker on the front door of the little
cottage; and a tall, motherly woman of the neighborhood appeared and
ushered him in.

Uncle Capen's unmarried daughter, a woman of sixty, her two brothers
and their wives, and half-a-dozen neighbors were sitting in the tidy
kitchen, where a crackling wood-fire in the stove was suggesting a
hospitable cup of tea.

The ministers appearance, breaking the formal gloom, was welcomed.

"Well," said Miss Maria, "I suppose the sermon is all writ by this time.
I think likely you 've come down to read it to us."

"No," said Holt, "I have left the actual writing of it till I get all my
facts. I thought perhaps you might have thought of something else."

"No; I told you everything there was about father yesterday," she said.
"I 'm sure you can't lack of things to put in; why, father lived a
hundred years--and longer, too, for he was a hundred years and six days,
you remember."

"You know," said Holt, "there are a great many things that are very
interesting to a man's immediate friends that don't interest the
public." And he looked to Mr. Small for confirmation.

"Yes, that 's so," said Mr. Small, nodding wisely.

"But, you see, father was a centenarian," said Maria, "and so that makes
everything about him interesting. It's a lesson to the young, you know."

"Oh, yes, that's so," said Mr. Small, "if a man lives to be a
centurion."

"Well, you all knew our good friend," said Mr. Holt. "If any of you will
suggest anything, I shall be very glad to put it in."

Nobody spoke for a moment.

"There's one interesting thing," said one of the sons, a little old man
much like his father; "that is, that none of his children have ever gone
meander