Incidental to this work I unearthed many written data of the past--my youthful diaries, school exercises, some two feet of letters from my parents, especially my mother, for more than a quarter of a century after I left home and before her death; and several hundred large envelopes of carefully filed correspondence with many friends and strangers on many topics. All these had to be at least cursorily glanced over. Part of this voluminous material no one, I am convinced, will ever care to reperuse. My own offspring have no interest in it, so why not consign it to oblivion now that it has served its final purpose? There is little of value to the living or of special credit to the dead in it all; so I conclude there is more of real piety, even to the memory of my mother, to select a number of the best of her missives which most clearly show her constant and affectionate solicitude and love, and burn all the rest. I am sure that both she and my father would heartily commend this course. So, as I watched them burn in the grate one solitary spring at evening twilight, I felt that I had completed a filial function of interment of her remains. No profane ear can now ever hear what she whispered into mine. She tried to convey everything good in her beautiful soul to me, her eldest, wanted me to do everything commendable that she could not and realize all her own thwarted ambitions. I hope that I may yet do something more worthy of her fondest hopes. If I seem to have cremated her very soul, or so much of it as she gave me, I feel that I have thus done the last and most sacred act of service which such a son can render such a mother. By all this purgation I have, at any rate, saved my offspring from a task that could not be other than painful and embarrassing to them, and relieved them from inheriting a burden of impedimenta which they themselves would not have the hardihood to destroy, at least for years after my demise, and which could be of no earthly use to them or any one else. And now it only remained for me to make my last will and testament and bequeath all that I have left where I hope it may do most good. This should have been done long ago but I have been withheld from this duty, partly by preoccupation but far more by the instinctive reluctance all feel to thus anticipate their own death. A dozen modes of disposing of my modest estate had occurred to me and there were countless considerations to be weighed. Some provisions were obvious but more were beset with a puzzling array of _pros_ and _cons_. But the time was over-ripe, and so I nerved myself for this ordeal, feeling sure there would be regrets, revisions, or perhaps codicils every year I lived. But when it was duly signed and witnessed there was, on the whole, great relief, as from having accomplished a long-looming and difficult task.