And now I have resigned, and after months of delay and with gratifying expressions of regret, another younger captain, whom, happily, I can fully trust, is in my place. I had always planned that my retirement, when it came, should be complete. I would do my full duty up to the last moment and then sever every tie and entirely efface myself, so far as the institution I had served was concerned, and would distinctly avoid every worry, even as to the fate of my most cherished policies. This was only fair to my successor and all my interests must henceforth be vested elsewhere. But what a break after all these decades! It seemed almost like anticipatory death, and the press notices of my withdrawal read to me not unlike obituaries. The very kindness of all these and of the many private letters and messages that came to me suggested that their authors had been prompted by the old principle, _De mortuis nil nisi bonum_. For more than forty years I have lectured at eleven o’clock and the cessation of this function leaves a curious void. My friends have already fancied that I tend to grow loquacious at that hour. If I speak or write now, it must be to a very different clientele. During all these years, too, I have held a seminary nearly every Monday night, and now when this evening comes around my faculties activate, even if _bombinantes in vacuo_. On those evenings I have been greatly stimulated by familiar contact with vigorous student minds, for on these occasions they and I have inspired each other to some of our best _aperçus_. But now this contact is gone forever. My _Journal_, which for more than thirty years had taken so much of my care and, at first in its nursling period, of my surplus funds and had become for me an institution in itself, is also now transferred to better hands. Thus, I am rather summarily divorced from my world, and it might seem at first as if there was little more to be said of me save to record the date of my death--and we all know that men who retire often die soon afterwards. So my prayer perhaps should be _Nunc dimittis_. Ex-presidents, like founders of institutions, have often lived to become meddling nuisances, so that even those whom they have most profited, secretly and perhaps unconsciously long to participate in an impressive funeral for them. What can remain but a trivial postscript? And would not some of the suggested forms of painless extinction be worthy of consideration? Of course it is bitter to feign that I am suddenly dead to these interests I have so long lived for, as all the proprieties demand I should do and as I inexorably will to do for my very heart and soul went into them. But I did not build a monument to myself in any sense but strove only to fashion an instrument of service and such I know it will remain--and, I hope, far more effectively than under my hand.