common burden of continuous existence, as soon as I had skipped into years of discretion. Not for me did Time pass with that tragic footstep which never returns on itself; for me he was not the irrevocable, the relentless. I regretted my lost youth--but it was not with hopeless, passionate tears, with mutinous yearnings after the impossible; it was as one who waves a regretful adieu to a charming girl he will meet again." "Ah! but you will not meet her again," I said softly. "No; but the feeling was the same. Of course, when I was thirty I did not know I should die before I was two. I had no more privilege of prescience than the ordinary mortal. But in everything else how enviable was my lot compared to his whom every day is sweeping towards Death, for whom no vision of renewed youth gleams behind the black hangings! Oh! the glory of growing old without dread, with the assurance that age, which is ripening you, is not ripening you for the Gleaner, that the years will add wisdom without eternally subtracting the capacity for joy, and that every tottering step is bringing you nearer, not the Grave, but the joyous resurrection of your youth!" "And you have experienced that?" I cried, with envious incredulity. "Yes," answered the baby solemnly. "Of course I prepared for the Great Change. Not that Nature did not herself smooth the metamorphosis. The loss of teeth, the gradual baldness, the feeble limbs, everything pointed to the proximity of my Second Childhood. I knew that my odd life had not much longer to run, that at any moment the transformation might take place and the even numbers begin. Giving out that I was going to explore the African deserts, and accompanied only by my faithful body-servant, Downton, I retired to Egypt to await the great event, having previously ordered baby-linen and the various requisites of infantile toilette. I had at one time meditated providing myself with parents, but ultimately concluded that they would prove too troublesome to manage, and that it would be better to trust myself entirely to the management of Downton, since I had already placed myself in his power by leaving him all my money." "But what necessity was there for that?" I enquired.