people around him. When he talked to them, it was the past speaking to
the present, or rather to the future,--for the children were of a
generation which had not become actual. Their part in life, thus far,
was only to be happy and to draw knowledge from a thousand sources. As
yet, it was not their time to do.

Sometimes, as Grandfather gazed at their fair, unworldly countenances, a
mist of tears bedimmed his spectacles. He almost regretted that it was
necessary for them to know anything of the past or to provide aught for
the future. He could have wished that they might be always the happy,
youthful creatures who had hitherto sported around his chair, without
inquiring whether it had a history. It grieved him to think that his
little Alice, who was a flower bud fresh from paradise, must open her
leaves to the rough breezes of the world, or ever open them in any
clime. So sweet a child she was, that it seemed fit her infancy should
be immortal.

But such repinings were merely flitting shadows across the old man's
heart. He had faith enough to believe, and wisdom enough to know, that
the bloom of the flower would be even holier and happier than its bud.
Even within himself, though Grandfather was now at that period of life
when the veil of mortality is apt to hang heavily over the soul, still,
in his inmost being he was conscious of something that he would not have
exchanged for the best happiness of childhood. It was a bliss to which
every sort of earthly experience--all that he had enjoyed, or suffered
or seen, or heard, or acted, with the broodings of his soul upon the
whole--had contributed somewhat. In the same manner must a bliss, of
which now they could have no conception, grow up within these children,
and form a part of their sustenance for immortality.