that it would ever come. And now I was here again, and forty-six. Well, my health was good, my ancestors were long-lived,—all except my mother, who came to an untimely grave,—and I should live to be ninety at the very least. And then—there might be another world. No one can prove that there is not. But I am lingering too long around the old graveyard of my childhood home, and if I do not go out into the living, moving world, no one will ever read my book. And still I fancy that I am like all the other men and women who were ever born; we eat and drink, and laugh and dance, and go our way along the path of life, and join the universal conspiracy to keep silent on the momentous final event that year by year draws closer to our lives. Distance was as vague and illusive and as hard to realize as time. A trip to the next town, four miles away, awoke in my mind all the feeling of change and travel and adventure that a voyage across the sea can bring to-day. I recall one great event that stands out clearly in my childhood days. For months and months I had been promised a long trip with my older sister to visit my Aunt Jane. She lived miles and miles away, and we must take a railroad train to reach her home. For weeks I revelled in the expectation of that long-promised trip. I wondered if the train would really stop at our station long enough for me to get on board; if there would be danger of falling out if I should raise the window of the car; and what would happen if we should be carried past the town, or the train should run off the track. I am always sure of a fresh emotion when I think of the moment that we were safely seated in the car and the train began to move away. How I watched and wondered as the houses and telegraph poles flew past in our mad flight! And how I stored my mind with facts and fancies to tell the wondering boys when I returned! if indeed I ever should. I remember particularly how I pleaded with the train conductor to let me keep the pasteboard ticket that had been handed to me through the hole in the little window at the station when I took the train. I felt that this would be a souvenir of priceless worth, but the conductor regretfully told me that he must deny my wish. It seems even now as if I journeyed across a continent, there were so many things to see that were wholly new and strange. And yet my Aunt Jane lived only twenty miles away, and the trip must have been made in one short hour or less. Many times since then I have boarded a train to cross half the continent. I have even stood on the platform of the Orient Express in Paris, and waited for the signal to start on the long journey across Europe to Constantinople; but I have never felt such emotions as stirred my soul when the train actually moved away to take me to see Aunt Jane.