No sooner was his identity known than a throng of guests gathered
about Posterity, all expressing the most generous interest in his
welfare, and many boasting of the sacrifices which they had made, or
were willing to make, in his behalf. Some, with as much secrecy as
possible, desired his judgment upon certain copies of verses or
great manuscript rolls of prose; others accosted him with the
familiarity of old friends, taking it for granted that he was
perfectly cognizant of their names and characters. At length,
finding himself thus beset, Posterity was put quite beside his
patience.

"Gentlemen, my good friends," cried he, breaking loose from a misty
poet who strove to hold him by the button, "I pray you to attend to
your own business, and leave me to take care of mine! I expect to
owe you nothing, unless it be certain national debts, and other
encumbrances and impediments, physical and moral, which I shall find
it troublesome enough to remove from my path. As to your verses,
pray read them to your contemporaries. Your names are as strange to
me as your faces; and even were it otherwise,--let me whisper you a
secret,--the cold, icy memory which one generation may retain of
another is but a poor recompense to barter life for. Yet, if your
heart is set on being known to me, the surest, the only method is,
to live truly and wisely for your own age, whereby, if the native
force be in you, you may likewise live for posterity."

"It is nonsense," murmured the Oldest Inhabitant, who, as a man of
the past, felt jealous that all notice should be withdrawn from
himself to be lavished on the future, "sheer nonsense, to waste so
much thought on what only is to be."