ADDRESS OF THE DYING YEAR.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2374, 31 December 1921, Page 2

ADDRESS OF THE DYING YEAR.

IF we might for a moment personify die dying year in his last days, we should picture him a little shrivelled old man —shrivelled as one of his grandsire’s winter pipe pins—piping in the shrill treble of extreme age, and uttering an experience strongly resembling that of human life. “Listen to me, mortals!” he might say, with the same emphasis with which the old, wise by experience, say the like to the young, who will never be wise without it: — “Listen to me, ye mortals! for I also am of the race of the epheme;als. I had my sturdy youth, when it seemed that my life would never end; and T dug, and ploughed, and planted, and enjoyed, my jocund prime and my golden summer; and I decked myself in the garlands of' May, and reaped the yellow harvest, and gathered the purple vintage of autumn; but scarcely had I attained the object of my desires and secured the plenty for which 1 laboured, than I found the shadows lengthening, and the days shortening, and my breath growing short with them, and decrepitude coining upon me, and the days at hand of which I said —‘I have no pleasure in them.’ I have laid up riches and know not who shall gather them; have planted trees which must shade far distant years, and stored the vintage of which other years must drink.”—Professor Rogers.