Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853,
By G. P. Putnam and Company,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.
Billin & Brothers, Printers and Stereotypers, 20 North William street, N. Y.
[INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.]
So! I have come to be an old man at last! and I hav'n't been a great while about it either. No one is a great while about anything nowadays. Where is my life? heighho! here I am holding tight on to the little end, and it slipping all the while faster and faster out of my fingers. And no wonder; sixty-nine years all taking hold of the rope, and all pulling together, walk it off as fast as two engines racing to a fire, and here is the seventieth running to join them. By the way, what a strange dream that was I had the other night! if I were superstitious, I should suppose it meant something, for I never had any like it before—the world on fire! ten thousand bells ringing the alarm! hurry up the engines! pour on water! but the ocean is burning too! Payne's problem is solved at last. Hark to those volcanoes! great guns, double shotted, there goes Mount Etna, and there's Vesuvius, and that, that must be Cotapaxi; what a tremendous burst there'll be when the fire reaches the great central magazine! but where are the mourners? do the stars miss one of their number? will its ashes reach their sphere?
Well, I have seen a great deal—magnetic telegraph railroads, woman's rights, crystal palaces, California, Australia, and now, ships of twelve thousand tons, the Atlantic turned into a horse-pond: what is the world coming to? There was no such thing when I was young—we didn't profess then to be wiser than all before us. I'm glad I shall soon be out of the way. And yet I should like to see the end. The end, when will that be? and who can tell what it will be? Heighho! it racks my old heart all to pieces, like a locomotive on a corduroy road. No wonder man's life has been shortened to three score-years and ten. How poor old Methusalah would have stared! why we live as long in a year as he did in one of his sleepy centuries. He never could have stood the racket, unless he had first been dried in an oven. It would have fretted the skin off him, as it did off that big juicy apple I had in my pocket when I rode Squire Smith's old trotting horse. Let me see, that was forty, fifty, yes, fifty-one years ago—strange how I remember such a trifle.
Well, well, I have overlapped my time, I don't seem to belong here. That was what that young fire-brain, what's his name, said this morning. He and I were like an ox yoked with a locomotive. I'm the ox; yes, yes, he's right; I can't keep up with their new-fangled ways; nor I don't want to either, they are too fast altogether. All I want is to die and be buried before they harness their steam to the hearses; and yet they've done that already. What was that railroad train the other day at Norwalk but a train of hearses, a great funeral procession? only that they put the folks into them before they were dead.
Yes, yes, the dead ride fast—tramp, tramp, along the land they go; splash, splash, along the sea; and why shouldn't they, if they like it, as well as their betters?