know that he died too early. He had learned a
bad habit, and for a man or a Bug who has learned a
bad habit, I am not certain that death can come too
soon. He died thinking he knew everything worth
knowing, for I have no doubt that through the panes
of my window and across my narrow street he thought
he had seen the World. Just as we larger, but
not wiser animals think that after gazing through
our little theological panes, we have seen clear through
Eternity, and into the mind of the Father. After
all, my Moth was not worse off than the rest of us.
We have all our little streets which we call the World,
and our little pane of glass through which we think
we see all that is worth seeing, and we need but a
soupcon of bad example to make us blindly dash into
the worst of follies. Let us never forget that,
more than for this Moth, there is for us an unseen
Hand that after these follies picks us up and starts
us on our course again, with a pitying touch, and
that, more than this, when the last twilight of evening
shall gather around us, and the hands of those we love
can be no longer seen, there shall appear to us through
the gray mist of Death, that bright and gentle Hand,
and with it the face of a Father and a Friend.
OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN IV
I must tell you of the Major’s Last Love.
I had thought I would leave it in my note book, but
a letter, which I can only read through a mist of
tears, has changed my mind.
Strolling out as the sun was setting, on the first
evening of my stay at a village hotel last summer,
I saw two shadows cast across the street; one so very
long, and one so very short, as to look ridiculous.
They were the shadows of the Major and his Last Love.
The Major, hatless, was swinging musingly the torn
straw hat of his love, while the little three-year-old
lady herself was struggling along with the Major’s
hat piled with flowers and toys and teacups on her
return from having “a party” on the river
edge. The little feet stumbled, the party crockery
flew, and the two shadows melted in one as the prattling
owner and the tall Major knelt together to gather
them up. That was my first sight of the Major
and his love.
I cannot say that any of us knew, or came to know,
all about the Major; always excepting that we loved
him. He was tall, straight, and frost-haired.
His regular features were of that sort that might have
belonged to a man of forty-five or a man of sixty,
and he was a changeable sort of a person who one day
would look one age and the next another. Of his
means, we knew absolutely nothing. It was said
that his wealth had been carried away by the civil
war and that he was living on a small but sufficient
remainder, which was doubtless true. Over his
gray moustache there was a blue eye that sometimes
looked as it might belong to a boy of eighteen and
sometimes had the weary look of a man long acquainted
with grief. His skin was as soft as a woman’s
