And now I toss the “Last Leaf” on my probably over-large accumulation of printed pages.  What I have set down is in no way an autobiography.  It is simply the presentment of the panorama of nearly fourscore momentous years as unrolled before one pair of eyes.  Whether the eyes have served their owner well or ill the gentle reader will judge.  I hope I have not obtruded myself unduly, and that I may be pardoned as I close, if I am for a moment personal.  My eyes have given me notice that they have done work enough and I do not blame them for insisting upon rest.  As to organs in general I have scarcely known that I had any.  They have maintained such peace among themselves, and been so quiet and deferential as they have performed their functions that I have taken no note of them, having rarely experienced serious illness.  Had Aesop possessed my anatomy, he would have had small data for inditing his fable as to the discord between the “Members” and their commissariat, and the long generations might have lacked that famous incentive to harmony and co-operation.  I venture to say this in explanation of my stubborn optimism, which is due much less to any tranquil philosophy I may have imbibed than to my inveterate eupepsia.  My optimism has not decreased as I have grown old, and I record here as the last word, my faith that the world grows better.  I recall with vividness nineteen Presidential campaigns, and believe that in no one has the outlook been so hopeful as now.  Never have the leaders at the fore in all parties been more able and high-minded.  I have purposed in this book to speak of the dead and not the living.  Were it in place for me to speak of men who are still strivers, I could give good reason, derived from personal touch, for the faith I put in men whose names now resound.  However the nation moves, strong and good hands will receive it, and it will survive and make its way.  Agitation, the meeting of crises, the anxious application of expedients to threatening dangers,—­these we are in the midst of, we always have been and always shall be.  Turmoil is a condition of life, beneficently so, for through turmoil comes the education that leads man on and up.  We encounter shocks that will seem seismic.  But it will only be the settling of society to firmer bases of justice.  In our confusions England is our fellow, but a better world is shaping there, though in the earthquake crash of old strata so much seems to totter.  And farther east in France, Germany, and Russia are better things, and signs of still better.  Levant and Orient rock with violence, but they are rocking to happier and humaner order.  What greater miracle than the coming to the front among nations of Japan!  Will her people perhaps distance their western teachers and models.  Shall we reverse the poet’s line to read “Better fifty years of China than a cycle of the West?” Society proceeds toward betterment, and not catastrophe, as individuals may proceed on stepping-stones of their