This morning I read in the paper of the death of Mrs. White, and the short, inadequate paragraph startled me, not exactly because Mrs. White was dead, but rather because until yesterday afternoon she was alive. I had assumed that the good lady (how I wish I could remember just when I left off hating her and began to think of her as a good lady!) had died years ago and there was something grotesque and uncanny in her suddenly up and dying again out of a blue sky, so to speak. It was very much as if someone should pop out of an old tomb in a cemetery, take a hasty look around and then pop in again. If I had not long ago ceased to feel bitterly about her, I should have told myself that it was just like Mrs. White, that she was not a sincere woman, that she had never inspired me with confidence. But water has been flowing under the bridge for thirty-two years since my tears used to flow at Mrs. White’s, and it so long ago eroded my bitterness that I now cannot recall when it was I last had any. Had I been asked yesterday how old Mrs. White would be by this time, I should have answered very conservatively for fear of seeming to exaggerate, “About a hundred and ninety-six,” and the paper tells me she “passed away” in her seventy-first year. Good heavens--then when I knew her and regarded her as a senile monster with a gizzard of granite, she must really have been a nice-looking young woman of thirty-eight. How very strange. Whenever I begin to think of Mrs. White’s I have an unusually uncontrollable desire to write my memoirs. I’m sure I don’t know why I have always so longed to write my memoirs. Perhaps it is because I know that memoirs, however inane, are the only form of literature that is absolutely sure of getting itself read. Then, too, they must be so easy to produce. They don’t have to be by anybody in particular, and they present no technical difficulties whatever. They have to begin somewhere, but one need never be bothered by wondering how they ought to end. They don’t end, they merely stop. Very often indeed they refuse to do even that. Madame de Genlis, for instance, after minutely covering the ground in her “Souvenirs,” trimmed a new pen and, without pausing to separate herself into chapters or to take breath, dashed off eight obese volumes of “Mémoires.” Like all works of this nature, they are “perfectly fascinating” and are still read, but there is no reason whatever why I shouldn’t produce eight volumes just as twaddlesome. For beyond writing materials and a tireless forearm there are in the manufacture of memoirs only two essentials: one must live during an interesting period of the world’s history and one must from time to time meet, or at the very least see, a variety of well-known persons. These conditions are extremely difficult to avoid. They arise quite naturally after one has taken the first costly and fatally easy step of being born at all. Seventy years afterward every period of the world’s history