Grandmother expressed her sense of the intended good offices, but gingerly, with my assistance, set to work to find out what the little fellow meant--what in the world he had got into his head; and it was no easy task, I can assure you. But at last we succeeded. It appeared that the confusion in the boy’s mind arose from the, in a sense, double meaning of the word “old.” He associated it, naturally enough, with the idea of poverty, material worthlessness, in conjunction with that of age and long-livedness. Every human being, he believed, had to descend, “when you gets very old,” to a state of beggardom; his dear granny, like everybody else, would have to wander from door to door with a piteous tale of want; but from his door she should never be repulsed; nay indeed, he himself would take her by the hand and lead her on the painful round. Nor did he murmur at this strange order of things; to him it was a “has-to-be,” accepted like the darkness that follows the day; like the gradual out-at-toe condition of his own little worn-out shoes; and I greatly doubt if our carefully-worded explanation of his mistake carried real conviction with it. I strongly suspect that he remained on the look-out for granny in her new _rôle_ for a good many months, or even years, to come. Some other curious childish beliefs recur to my memory. I knew a little girl who cherished as an undoubted article of faith a legend--how originated who can say?--perhaps suggested by some half poetical talk of her elders about the aging year, the year about to bid us farewell and so on, perhaps entirely evolved out of her own fantastic little brain--that on the 31st of December the “old year” took material human form and strolled about the world in the guise of an aged man, though unrecognised by the uninitiated crowd. She had the habit on this day of taking up her quarters in a corner of the deep, old-fashioned window-sill of her nursery, and there, in patient silence, gazing down into the street till Mr. Old-year should have passed by. Nor were her hopes disappointed. She always caught sight of him and nodded her own farewell, unexpectful of any response. “He couldn’t say good-bye to everybody; he wouldn’t have time,” was her explanation to the little sister to whom she at last confided her odd fancy, and through whose indiscretion it leaked out to the rest of the nursery group. “But how do you know him?” she was asked. “Is he always dressed the same?” “Oh, no,” was the reply, “he sometimes wears a black coat and sometimes a brown; and one year he had a blue one with brass buttons. That was the first year I saw him, and I have never missed him since. He has always white hair, and he walks slowly, looking about him. I always know him, almost as well as you’d know Santa Claus if he came along the street, though, of course, he never does. _He_ comes down chimneys, and I don’t think children ever do see him, for they’re always asleep.”