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“Sure enough!” cried they with one accord, while the musing look in their eyes gave place to a vivacious and merry expression.

“My mother is n’t near as old as we ‘re going to be. Her things won’t do,” said Nellie.

“Nor mine,” echoed Jessie; “but perhaps Mary’s grandmother will let us have some of her things.”

“In that case,” suggested Frank, “it will be only civil to invite her to the party.”

“To be sure, why not?” agreed Jessie. “It is to be an ‘old folks’ party, and her presence will give a reality to the thing.”

“I don’t believe she ‘ll come,” said George. “You see being old is dead earnest to her, and she won’t see the joke.”

But Mary said she would ask her anyway, and so that was settled.

“My father is much too large in the waist for his clothes to be of any service to me,” said George lugubriously.

But Frank reminded him that this was a hint as to his get-up, and that he must stuff with pillows that the proverb might be fulfilled, “Like father like son.”

And then they were rather taken aback by Henry’s obvious suggestion that there was no telling what the fashion in dress would be in a. d. 1925, “even if,” he added, “the scientists leave us any A. D. by that time,” though Frank remarked here that a. d. would answer just as well as Anno Darwinis, if worst came to worst. But it was decided that there was no use trying after prophetical accuracy in dress, since it was out of the question, and even if attainable would not suggest age to their own minds as would the elderly weeds which they were accustomed to see.

“It’s rather odd, is n’t it,” said Jessie gravely, “that it did n’t occur to anybody that in all probability not over one or two of us at most will be alive fifty years hence.”

“Let’s draw lots for the two victims, and the rest of us will appear as ghosts,” suggested Frank grimly.

“Poor two,” sighed Nellie. “I ‘m sorry for them. How lonely they will be. I’m glad I have n’t got a very good constitution.”

But Henry remarked that Jessie might have gone further and said just as truly that none of them would survive fifty years, or even ten.

“We may, some of us, escape the pang of dying as long as that,” said he, “but that is but a trifle, and not a necessary incident of death. The essence of mortality is change, and we shall be changed. Ten years will see us very different persons. What though an old dotard calling himself Henry Long is stumping around fifty years hence, what is that to me? I shall have been dead a half century by that time.”

“The old gentleman you speak so lightly of will probably think more tenderly of you than you do of him,” said Jessie.

“I don’t believe it,” answered Henry. “In fact, if we were entirely true to nature next Wednesday, it would spoil the fun, for we probably should not, if actually of the age we pretend, think of our youth once a year, much less meet to talk it over.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” protested Nellie. “I ‘m sure all the story-books and poetry say that old folks are much given to reviewing their youth in a pensive, regretful sort of way.”

“That’s all very pretty, but it ‘s all gammon in my opinion,” responded Henry. “The poets are young people who know nothing of how old folks feel, and argue only from their theory of the romantic fitness of things. I believe that reminiscence takes up a very small part of old persons’ time. It would furnish them little excitement, for they have lost the feelings by which their memories would have to be interpreted to become vivid. Remembering is dull business at best. I notice that most persons, even of eventful lives, prefer a good novel to the pleasures of recollection. It is really easier to sympathize with the people in a novel or drama than with our past selves. We lose a great source of recreation just because we can’t recall the past more vividly.”