334 An American Fruit-Farm 



care nothing for their great-grandmother, but they 

 would like to have her silver spoons; others pay 

 liberally for anybody^s old table. Some like to 

 think, as they sit at the Chippendale desk: 

 ''Here my father wrote; and his father, and his 

 father's father." There is the nice suggestion of 

 continuity and a dim impulse toward ancestor- 

 worship, — a sort of return to first things. Who 

 does not make a more cautious bid or play a better 

 game if the card table came over in the Mayflower? 



The man who has grown old on his fruit-farm 

 lives in daily communion with an unseen world — 

 his yesterdays; and no man's life is so interesting 

 to him as his own. "Leave the old farm?" he 

 answers when some one would buy — ''Yes, when 

 I leave the world!" "Leave the farm?" says the 

 heir, to whom it is only bushes and bother — "Well, 

 you just offer me a price and see! " He parts with 

 his inheritance like Esau. No man willingly sells 

 his life, and associations are life. The stranger 

 cannot buy them; the heirs cannot sell them, be- 

 cause they were never theirs. Even the old man 

 cannot part with them, for they are he himself. 



At the Pennsylvania Historical Society in Phila- 

 delphia there is a death mask of Napoleon. Not 

 many years ago an aged man might have been 

 seen on the eighteenth of June, standing, hat in 

 hand, gazing reverently upon the mask. It was 

 George Nieman, private secretary to Blucher, dur- 

 ing the hundred days. He fought at Waterloo; he 

 captured the iron carriage used by the Emperor 



