“I have not seen very much of the world to compare this with other places; but still, I think you are right, Anna. It is a ‘sweet old home.’ It is perfectly beautiful, and besides it seems to me that every one who was ever born here, or ever lived and died here, must have been very good and loving, that their spirits still pervade the place, and make it holy,” said Drusilla, warmly.
“My dear, you will make me so much in love with my home that I shall not like to grow old and die and leave it,” said the General, smiling.
“Dear uncle, please to believe that there is not the slightest necessity for you to grow old, much less to die before your century is completed. And if you do so I shall think that you will be treating your loving children very badly,” said Drusilla.
“My dear!”
“Yes, I do. I think the deaths of most people who die, come of their indifference to the power that the Lord has given them of living on. Now, I think that you have the power to live on in the full possession of all your faculties to the age of one hundred years at the very least, and how much longer I don’t know. And I shall take it very hard of you, if you don’t do it, uncle.”
“Hem; I shall try to oblige you my dear,” said the General, dryly.
“I hope you will! for you know I expect you to live to see your namesake, Leonard Lyon, junior, a bishop, a judge or a general, (whichever he shall please to be, for it will depend upon his choice of a profession,) or even President of the United States. The highest position is open to competition and you cannot tell what he may be yet; you must live to see.”
“Do you intend to live your century out, Drusilla?”
“If it please Providence, yes; for I shall try to preserve the gift of life he has given me. And when I shall be a hundred years old, my little Leonard will be eighty-four, and a wigged chief-justice, or a mitred archbishop or something equally exalted. And I should not wonder if you should be alive and merry then.”
“Oh, tut, tut, tut! you are laughing at me, little Drusa!”