I have reached my appointed limits, leaving unsaid one-half of the things I had wished to narrate.  Reminiscences come crowding in unbidden, and, like the flickering lights of the Will-o’-the-wisp, they tend to lead the wayfarer far astray from the path he had originally traced out for himself.  “Jack-o’-lanthorn” is proverbially a fickle guide to follow, and should I have succumbed to his lure, I can only proffer my excuses, and plead in extenuation that sixty years is such a long road to re-travel that an occasional deviation into a by-path by elderly feet may perhaps be forgiven.

Charles Kingsley, in the “Water-Babies”, has put some very touching lines into the mouth of the old school-dame in Vendale, lines which come home with pathetic force to persons of my time of life.

    “When all the world is young, lad,
    And all the trees are green;
    And every goose a swan, lad,
    And every lass a queen;
    Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
    And round the world away;
    Young blood must have its course, lad
    And every dog his day.

    “When all the world is old, lad,
    And all the trees are brown;
    And all the sport is stale, lad,
    And all the wheels run down;
    Creep home, and take your place there,
    The old and spent among: 
    God grant you find one face there
    You loved when all was young.”

I protest indignantly against the idea that all the wheels are run down; nor are the trees yet brown, for kindly autumn, to soften us to the inevitable passing of summer, touches the trees with her magic wand, and forthwith they blaze with crimson and russet-gold, pale-gold and flaming copper-red.

In the mellow golden sunshine of the still October days it is sometimes difficult to realise that the glory of the year has passed beyond recall, though the sunshine has no longer the genial warmth of July, and the more delicate flowers are already shrivelled by the first furtive touches of winter’s finger-tips.  Experience has taught us that the many-hued glory of autumn is short-lived; the faintest breeze brings the leaves fluttering to the ground in golden showers.  Soon the few that remain will patter gently down to earth, their mother.  Winter comes.