As to my parents, they always seemed old; and when I was not vexed about things they would not let me do, I felt sad to think their days of sport were past and gone. I well remember the terrible day when they laid my mother in her grave, and the one consolation I felt was that she had lived a long life and that her natural time had come. Even now, as I look back on the vague remembrances of my mother, I have no thought of any time when she was not old. Yet last year I went to see the little headstone that marks her modest grave. I read her name, and the commonplace lines that said she had been a good wife and a loving mother; and this I have no doubt was true, even though I found it on a churchyard stone. Poor soul! she never had a chance to be anything else or more. But when I looked to see her age, I felt a shock as of one waking from a dream; for there, chiselled in the marble stone and already growing green with moss, I read that she had died at forty-eight. And here I stood looking at my old mother’s grave, and my last birthday was my forty-sixth. Was my mother then so young when she lay down to sleep?—and all my life I had thought that she was old! I felt and knew, as I sadly looked upon the stone, that my career was all before me still, and that I had only been wandering and blundering in a zigzag path through childhood and youth, to begin the career I was about to run. True, as I drew close to the marble slab to read the smaller letters that told of the virtues of the dead, I put on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses to spell the chiselled words. And these glasses were my second pair! Only a few days before, I had visited an oculist and told him that my old ones somehow did not focus as they should, but warned him not to give me a new pair that magnified the letters any more than the ones I had. After several trials he found a pair through which I could see much clearer than before, and he assured me on his honor that they were no stronger than the ones I was about to lay aside,—only they were ground in a different way. And although I had lived on the earth for six and forty years, I believed he told the truth. I remembered, too, that only a few days before an impudent college football hero gave me a seat in the street-car while he stood up. But then college boys were always thoughtless and ill-mannered, and boastful of their strength. I recovered from the shock that came upon me as I realized that my mother had died while she was really young; and then my mind recalled a day that had been buried in oblivion for many, many years,—a day when I rested upon the same spot where I was sitting now, and when the tremendous thought of eternal sleep dawned upon my mind. No doubt it was my mother’s stone that so long ago awakened me to conscious life. I remember that on that far-off day I was fifteen years of age, and that I consoled myself by thinking that at any rate I should live until I was sixty, which was so far away that I could not even dream