recognize the slender fair boys who used to look so girlish.
"Is it really you?" I exclaim, and they answer, "Yes," with a deep sonorous note so different from the boyish voices I had expected to hear, that I start back involuntarily.
And these others? Their features are not changed, to be sure, their figures are as robust and well set-up as ever, but the smile has vanished, there is no brightness in the eye.
"What has happened to you?" I ask; and they answer, "Nothing."
Ah, how much better that some misfortune should have befallen them than that the years alone, and only six short years, should have had the power so sadly to transform them!
Here are others. Good God! One, two, three, five of them; let me look again; yes—gray-headed! What—at twenty-seven! Tell me—what happened? They shrug their shoulders and pass on.
Then I see a long file of my own friends, some of them the wildest of the class, one with a baby in his arms, one with a child by the hand, another leading two. What? So-and-so married? So-and-so a père de famille? Who would have thought it?
Here come others; some, with bowed heads and reddened eyes, sign to me sadly in passing. There is crape upon their sleeves.
