I saw in myself the seeds of a great thinker: a felicitous congruity of opposite capacities that had never before met in a single man--the sobriety of age tempered by the audacity of youth, fire and water, judgment and inspiration. I was revolutionist and reactionary in one. I read all the new books, and agreed with all the old." "All you tell me only makes the pathos of your premature death more intolerable," I said in moved accents. "You are, like Keats and Chatterton,--only an earlier edition,--an inheritor of unfulfilled renown." The little blue eyes smiled wistfully at me. "Not at all," said the wee rose-lips, with a quiver. "Don't you see, I have already dodged Death? Evidently, if I had taken my second year in its natural order, I should have been cut short by croup at the outset. Apparently I had enough vital energy in me to have lasted till seventy-seven, if I could only get over the croup. I think one ought to be satisfied with having survived himself by thirty odd years." "Yes, if you put it like that, the pathos lightens," I admitted. "Of course I saw from the first that you were considerably in advance of your age. Did you assure your life?" I asked, with a sudden thought. "I did; but by an oversight I let the policy be invalidated by my imaginary expedition to the African deserts. Downton has, however, taken out a fresh policy for my new life." "What a baffling complex of probabilities would be added to Life Assurances if your way of living were to become general!" I observed. "Downton will probably more than recoup himself for his first loss. Have you always been a bachelor, by the way?" I asked. "Yes," said the baby, with a sigh. "I missed marriage; it probably fell in an even year." "Poor child!" I cried, my eyes growing humid again. To think, too, of that beautiful young girl, that fond wife, waiting for him who would never come; that innocent maiden cheated of love and happiness because her appointed husband had not lived in the other alternate series of years,--to think of this tangled tragedy moved me to fresh tears, not a few of which were for the husband who never was.