I have my moods about such things as the Young Astronomer has, as we all have.  There are times when the thought of becoming utterly nothing to the world we knew so well and loved so much is painful and oppressive; we gasp as if in a vacuum, missing the atmosphere of life we have so long been in the habit of breathing.  Not the less are there moments when the aching need of repose comes over us and the requiescat in pace, heathen benediction as it is, sounds more sweetly in our ears than all the promises that Fame can hold out to us.

I wonder whether it ever occurred to you to reflect upon another horror there must be in leaving a name behind you.  Think what a horrid piece of work the biographers make of a man’s private history!  Just imagine the subject of one of those extraordinary fictions called biographies coming back and reading the life of himself, written very probably by somebody or other who thought he could turn a penny by doing it, and having the pleasure of seeing

    “His little bark attendant sail,
     Pursue the triumph and partake the gale.”

The ghost of the person condemned to walk the earth in a biography glides into a public library, and goes to the shelf where his mummied life lies in its paper cerements.  I can see the pale shadow glancing through the pages and hear the comments that shape themselves in the bodiless intelligence as if they were made vocal by living lips.

“Born in July, 1776!” And my honored father killed at the battle of Bunker Hill!  Atrocious libeller! to slander one’s family at the start after such a fashion!

“The death of his parents left him in charge of his Aunt Nancy, whose tender care took the place of those parental attentions which should have guided and protected his infant years, and consoled him for the severity of another relative.”

—­Aunt Nancy!  It was Aunt Betsey, you fool!  Aunt Nancy used to—­she has been dead these eighty years, so there is no use in mincing matters—­she used to keep a bottle and a stick, and when she had been tasting a drop out of the bottle the stick used to come off the shelf and I had to taste that.  And here she is made a saint of, and poor Aunt Betsey, that did everything for me, is slandered by implication as a horrid tyrant.

“The subject of this commemorative history was remarkable for a precocious development of intelligence.  An old nurse who saw him at the very earliest period of his existence is said to have spoken of him as one of the most promising infants she had seen in her long experience.  At school he was equally remarkable, and at a tender age he received a paper adorned with a cut, inscribed reward of merit.”

—­I don’t doubt the nurse said that,—­there were several promising children born about that time.  As for cuts, I got more from the schoolmaster’s rattan than in any other shape.  Didn’t one of my teachers split a Gunter’s scale into three pieces over the palm of my hand?  And didn’t I grin when I saw the pieces fly?  No humbug, now, about my boyhood!