"Kind friends around me fall
Like leaves in wintry weather,"

--he sang of his own dead heart in the stilly night.

"Thus kindly I scatter thy leaves on the bed
Where thy mates of the garden lie scentless and dead."

--he sang to the dying rose. In the red month of October the rose is
forty years old, as roses go. How small the world has grown to a man of
forty, if he has put his eyes, his ears and his brain to the uses for
which they are adapted. And as for time--why, it is no longer than a
kite string. At about the age of forty everything that can happen to a
man, death excepted, has happened; happiness has gone to the devil or is
a mere habit; the blessing of poverty has been permanently secured or
you are exhausted with the cares of wealth; you can see around the
corner or you do not care to see around it; in a word--that is,
considering mental existence--the bell has rung on you and you are up
against a steady grind for the remainder of your life. It is then there
comes to the habitual novel reader the inevitable day when, in anguish
of heart, looking back over his life, he--wishes he hadn't; then he asks
himself the bitter question if there are not things he has done that he
wishes he hadn't. Melancholy marks him for its own. He sits in his room
some winter evening, the lamp swarming shadowy seductions, the grate
glowing with siren invitation, the cigar box within easy reach for that
moment when the pending sacrifice between his teeth shall be burned out;
his feet upon the familiar corner of the mantel at that automatically
calculated altitude which permits the weight of the upper part of the
body to fall exactly upon the second joint from the lower end of the
vertebral column as it rests in the comfortable depression created by