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STORY OF ANOTHER PIONEER BY C. B. STEBBINS
June 7, 1882.
And so I returned to spend the rest of my life in Michigan; hardly better off in purse than when I first came, five years previously.
Forty years have gone since then. Fleeting and more fleeting the years speed by. Loved ones die, and children crowd around us who a little longer remain. Do men ever think they are old? Douglas Jerrold says a man is only as old as he feels. Some whom I thought were rather old men when I was a boy, still linger. They seem hardly to know that their step is less firm, or their eye less bright than in the past. It would be hazardous to call them old to their faces. I saw some such when I visited the mountain home of my childhood not long since. One was my schoolmaster when I was threading the intricacies of Nutting's grammar, and mastering the mysteries of Adams's Arithmetic. And Ms father died not many years ago. Another was a bank director fifty years ago, and he is still. He is kept on the board out of respect to the past, his opinions are heard by his colleagues, and I suppose he is still a main spoke in the wheel. Truly they are grand monuments of a past age. But with the frosts of eighty-five winters upon their heads,
Unconquered by the years they stand, In weakness strong, in spirit grand, Like girdled oak, still towering high. Death-struck—and yet, too proud to die.
Michigan
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