those who have all along been in his neighbourhood.  He had married in the interval, and as if to keep up his surprising youthfulness in all relations, he had taken a wife considerably older than himself.  It would probably have seemed to him a disturbing inversion of the natural order that any one very near to him should have been younger than he, except his own children who, however young, would not necessarily hinder the normal surprise at the youthfulness of their father.  And if my glance had revealed my impression on first seeing him again, he might have received a rather disagreeable shock, which was far from my intention.  My mind, having retained a very exact image of his former appearance, took note of unmistakeable changes such as a painter would certainly not have made by way of flattering his subject.  He had lost his slimness, and that curved solidity which might have adorned a taller man was a rather sarcastic threat to his short figure.  The English branch of the Teutonic race does not produce many fat youths, and I have even heard an American lady say that she was much “disappointed” at the moderate number and size of our fat men, considering their reputation in the United States; hence a stranger would now have been apt to remark that Ganymede was unusually plump for a distinguished writer, rather than unusually young.  But how was he to know this?  Many long-standing prepossessions are as hard to be corrected as a long-standing mispronunciation, against which the direct experience of eye and ear is often powerless.  And I could perceive that Ganymede’s inwrought sense of his surprising youthfulness had been stronger than the superficial reckoning of his years and the merely optical phenomena of the looking-glass.  He now held a post under Government, and not only saw, like most subordinate functionaries, how ill everything was managed, but also what were the changes that a high constructive ability would dictate; and in mentioning to me his own speeches and other efforts towards propagating reformatory views in his department, he concluded by changing his tone to a sentimental head voice and saying—­

“But I am so young; people object to any prominence on my part; I can only get myself heard anonymously, and when some attention has been drawn the name is sure to creep out.  The writer is known to be young, and things are none the forwarder.”

“Well,” said I, “youth seems the only drawback that is sure to diminish.  You and I have seven years less of it than when we last met.”

“Ah?” returned Ganymede, as lightly as possible, at the same time casting an observant glance over me, as if he were marking the effect of seven years on a person who had probably begun life with an old look, and even as an infant had given his countenance to that significant doctrine, the transmigration of ancient souls into modern bodies.