The time then prophesied has come; though the monument then promised has not been erected, and though it may never be, because a later and grander though scarce nobler struggle to preserve what was then first created, almost dwarfs the memory of the first contest and demands all the resources of wealth and art for its commemoration. The Pensioners of the Revolution are all gone, long ago, on the line of march to that great meeting where the last pension, whether of good or evil, shall be told out. Almost every year, beneath the eye of the Pension Agent, one more withered leaf would drop from the bough where it had feebly fluttered, and sad comments be made by the survivors when they met, with: "Ah, well-a-day!--poor ---- is gone!" and "Well, we are very old, and we must all follow him--some day!" with nervous shakings of the head and tremblings of the palsied hand, that told to all but themselves how soon the end must come. Thinner and thinner grew the group, reduced to six--to four--to three--to two! Oh, that sad, mournful, heart-breaking two!--enough gone to mark the coming extinction; enough still left to hold their melancholy converse! And then one day there came but _one_, who looked vacantly round on the empty space and seemed to remember that others than himself must once have been there, but to remember no more. The "Last Man" had not then been written, and _Geoffry Dale_ was yet to spring from the imagination or the memory of the dramatist and supply poor _Jesse Rural_ Blake with one of his best opportunities for throat-choking pathos; but in the last of the pensioners his history was sadly prefigured. One other lonely visit, and then the survivor was gone. All the group had dropped away. Their forms seemed to linger, long after the forms that cast them had mouldered into impalpable dust. It was the most natural thing in life for Robert Brand, months and even years after, to turn when hearing the measured beat of an old man's cane upon the floor, and look to see if the comer was not one of the veterans of Yorktown or of Trenton, yet lingering far behind the time of his companions. But no--death had come to all, and as yet no resurrection. The last pittance had been paid them, and laid away for the last time by their careful fingers; and they, too, had been laid away by the hoarding miser of human forms, in quiet graves in those humble country church-yards dotting the bosom of that land which they had helped to free and to cover with human glory!