Such is the implacable monotony of time, the pendulum oscillating in space, the indifferent repetition of events, in contrast with the brevity of our pilgrimage in this world. "But soon we all shall be of those Who come back--never!" Horrible thought! Cruel sentence, the definite meaning of which was like a summons to me,--death beckoning me from the shadows of the future. Before my imagination a thousand Christmas Eves filed by, a thousand hearths were extinguished, a thousand families that had supped together ceased to exist,--other children, other joys, other songs, lost forever; the loves of my grandparents, their antiquated mode of dress, their remote youth, the memories thereof that crowded upon them; my parents' childhood, the first Christmas celebration in our home, all the happiness that had preceded me! Then I could imagine, I could foresee, a thousand more Christmas Eves recurring periodically and robbing us of our life and hope,--future joys in which we should not all take part together, my brothers scattered over the earth, my parents naturally dying before us, the twentieth century following upon the nineteenth! The live coals turned to ashes,--my vanished youth, my old age, my grave, my posthumous memory, then the complete oblivion of me, the indifference, the ingratitude of my grandchildren, living of my blood, and who would laugh and enjoy while the worms profaned the skull in which these very thoughts were now conceived. The tears gushed from my eyes. I was asked why I was crying, and as I did not know or at least could not have defined the reason even to myself, my father concluded that I was sleepy, and I was accordingly sent to bed. Here was another motive for weeping, and so it happened that my first philosophical tears and my last childish ones were mingled. That night of insomnia which I spent listening to the joyous sounds of a celebration from which I had been excluded for being too much of a child, as my parents believed then,--or too much of a man, as I realize now,--was perhaps the bitterest of my life. I must have fallen asleep at last, however, for I cannot remember whether the projects of going to midnight Mass, the Nativity play, and making sherbet out of the snow in the court fell through or not. III. Where is my childhood? I feel as though I had just been relating a dream. The world is wide, after all! My paternal grandmother, the one who sang the couplet, died a long time ago. On the other hand, my brothers have married and have children. My father's harp, unstrung and broken, has been thrown among the cast-off furniture. It has been many a Christmas Eve since I had supper at home. My village has disappeared from the ocean of my life like the islet which the mariner leaves behind him.